i recently finished The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (amazing! thanks matt) and last night i was trying to decide what i should read next. i’ve been meaning for the longest time to get a start on the reading list for cogs next year, but y’know… anyway, i thought this would be a great start. read it on the way to work this morning and got through the first 6 pages of the 23 page preface… and i’m already really exited and want to save my ideas on its contents. here goes…

the main idea the book covers (or so the preface tells me) is the emergence of the idea of self - or consciousness - from “meaningless symbols” due to self referencing patterns. i therefore postulate that the entire universe is conscious. it is a media where its components follow certain rules (physics) and behave in certain ways. by themselves, they are meaningless symbols (any particle by itself is just a bit of mass or energy), but together they form patterns. in doing so, they have formed human brains which themselves are nothing but inanimate matter forming patterns that describe the reality they observe, ideas about themselves and other humans, and the universe as a whole. so, in the universe, there are patterns of particles that describe models of the universe, and it is therefore conscious of itself.

the preface also describes how there are different degrees of consciousness (Hofstadter describes this as the size of one’s soul, but that idea hasn’t grown on me yet), due to different levels of this self-referential recursion. so the universe and all it contains in it’s self-referential glory, is conscious in a more profound way than we could ever be of ourselves.

when we end up being able to perfectly model our own consciousness… will something cool happen (besides the obvious)? could the human consciousness (either in a biological or simulated brain) know itself better than the universe know itself? or would the fact that our *selves* are a subset of the larger universe mean that any of our self-reference and improvements to our consciousness is also just a subset of the universe’s recursion? what if we were to augment our minds with universes that contain beings that are also self aware… would that make us more conscious?

heavy