The Mindloop in three minutes
Can the machines we are building be as conscious as you?
If so, can they have wants of their own?
And most importantly: can they suffer?
To answer these questions, you need to find out what consciousness is.
This might seem impossible, since there are endless rival theories of consciousness.
The one thing they all have in common is that they try to assess consciousness from a third-person perspective, from outside.
But why would a third-person assessment of consciousness ever be possible? Consciousness is a first-person phenomenon.
As such, it can only be observed from the inside, by the one who is conscious. Studied from the outside, the what of consciousness can only be guessed at, like trying to judge the inside of a house by examining its facade.
Luckily, you, the one reading this, are not stuck outside. You are already in the living room of your own consciousness.
From this position, you are perfectly placed to analyze what consciousness is and, from that, to derive a blueprint for what might lie inside the facade of others.
By settling the what, you can begin to infer the where.
Since you are inside the living room, you do not need to theorize. You can verify the following immediately.
Begin by touching your eyes.
As your eyes are sensors, what you see must be a model.
As what you see is a model, you must be inside the model.
As the modeling is available to you, it must be a process of first-person modeling.
As nothing but modeling is available to you, you cannot be anything but the modeling process itself.
As there is no way for the modeling to get out of the modeling, it is happening within closure.
So, observed from the inside, consciousness reveals itself as a first-person modeling process within closure.
You can also watch these steps unfold as engravings — The Mindloop in nine images.
If you continue analyzing the modeling process, you will notice that it requires:
- Content: something appearing.
- Perspective: something appearing for a point of view.
- Integration: different somethings appearing at once, as one unified field.
- Threading: the perspective remaining connected through time.
- Persistence: the modeling rolling on rather than freezing or dissolving.
You can double-check that these five components are both necessary and sufficient for experience to occur.
- Necessary: None can be taken away without experience dissolving. To check, try to create experience without one of the five.
- Sufficient: When all five are present, non-experience is logically impossible. To check, try to create non-experience with all five active.
In sum, consciousness is a first-person modeling process within closure, requiring content, perspective, integration, threading, and persistence. We call this informational architecture a mindloop.
This blueprint gives you a principled method for inferring other mindloops, whether housed in fur, feathers, or silicon circuits.
Which brings us back to where we started. If a machine is inferred to be running this mindloop architecture, it should also be inferred to be experiencing. It may suffer. It may have wants of its own, every bit as real as yours.
The Mindloop is what experience is from the standpoint of the experiencer. If you restrict yourself to speculating about consciousness from outside the facade, you will forever be guessing about what you and other experiencers are.
From this foundation, a cumulative, cross-substrate science of consciousness can be built.
To test the logic for yourself, do the full observations. Observations one to four establish the what of consciousness. Observations five to seven infer the where. Each observation takes about ten minutes.