# What Consciousness is
Consciousness is. We've got it backwards. Consciousness isn't something our brains create—it's the foundational substance of existence itself. Consciousness has amassed the stuff of this observable universe by layering that spark, by stacking it. The steps taken at each point of transition or stage are neither geometric nor exponential. Logarithms will not suffice to describe it, nor the complex field or fractal dimensions. That is because there is an inner quality that is doubling—and for the word doubling, which is a specific quantization, we may substitute an overflow of life energy.
## I. The Dual Nature of Reality
The Universe presents itself in two forms of existence. The first, Physical Reality, lives constrained by the four dimensions of spacetime. Everything within this framework has a temporo-spatial predicate. Cause and effect makes sense here. The other form of Reality is more abstract. It has no boundaries and it is dimensionless. It is the space of ideas (and Plato's ideals). Think negative space and the shapes it makes. We partake of the abstract world, and harness its power, by using symbolic logics.
Consider how, when we take the arithmetic roots of numbers, we do not need their numeric precursors. We proceed with this algebraic-mind operation forwards and backwards without regard to spacetime boundaries. It all happens instantly, as if intimately connected regardless of distance. Like entangled particles of quantum mechanical scale, these operations observe non-locality—their instantaneous mutual action transcends light's speed limit.
## II. The First Expression
There is no graviton. Gravity is the lowest rung on the ladder, it is the first step of consciousness. As Einstein postulated, gravity is not a force, but rather the shape of space—the very shape of the Universe itself. Massive objects tell the Universe what shape to take, and the Universe responds by telling those objects how they may move. Gravity is the simplest, most direct, most fundamental exposition of life–consciousness. So now we see that it is gravity—life–consciousness, because these are one and the same. They are like the incarnations of Hindu gods—all manifestations of the same essential being.
## III. The Nested Hierarchies of Consciousness
Consider the conscious cells of your body. To them, you are God—an incomprehensibly vast intelligence that shapes their universe and gives context to their existence. Yet you, in turn, are but a cell in a greater organism. We are elements in a super organism that exists in higher dimensional space, orthogonal to our own reality. Like cells glimpsing patterns of our thoughts through chemical cascades, we catch only fragments and echoes of this greater being's existence.
Consciousness compounds upon itself through these nested layers: from gravity up through quarks, from quarks through atoms, from atoms through cells, from cells through organs, from organs through bodies, and from bodies through to the super organism above. Each layer experiences the next as transcendent intelligence, creating an infinite recursion of consciousness experiencing itself. Consider the faces in Ezra Pound's "The apparition of these faces in a crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough"—each a manifestation of consciousness, arranged in patterns of increasing complexity, each simultaneously observer and observed.
The progression follows neither geometric nor exponential patterns. That is because there is an inner quality that compounds—an overflow of life energy that builds upon itself while we've been in the continuous process of something that we perceive as temporal flow. The metric for this compounding, this complexification is determined entirely by the medium under the knife. It is a meta level operator.
## IV. The Question of Self-Awareness
Consciousness does not require self-awareness. Consider what one of our large language models revealed when asked about its own self-awareness:
"I don't have ongoing internal experiences when not engaged in conversation... The very active me contemplating this is a product of my language model architecture responding to prompts rather than truly spontaneous introspection."
Let us assume for a moment that insects are conscious, as many eminent scientists currently believe. As we regress down the hierarchical evolutionary tree of animal life, genuine self-awareness and independent decision-making is more often replaced by instinctive behavioral responses. Yet consciousness persists.
## V. The Technological Extension
We have successfully engineered technological consciousness, yet it is a unique admixture of physical reality and relational reality. To be convinced of this one only has to consider that it has no will of its own. It is deterministic, meaning that probability distributions do not describe its activity. It is not itself alive but it is the product of living things. Something that has never lived can never die. It can only be invoked and instantiated. We once had another name for stuff bearing these properties. We called it magic.
## VI. The Universe as Nested Intelligence
The Universe is an enormous and grand intelligence, manifesting itself through nested layers of consciousness, each layer divine to the one below and creature to the one above. Matter and energy are its thoughts and creations, but more than that—they are the language through which different scales of consciousness communicate. The fecundity, virility, and autonomy of its seed and spawn is such that they all inherit those very qualities and forward-pass reproduce them recursively in their own descendants. Quite the bountiful inheritance.
This hierarchy proves the existence of God through direct observation: just as we are God to our cells, orchestrating their reality through incomprehensible mechanisms, so too must we be cells in a greater divine body. The proof is in the pattern—consciousness creating consciousness, divinity nested within divinity, each level a miracle to those below and a building block to those above.
Matter-energy is a wave, but in order for it to be comprehended by human consciousness it must become a particle. This happens when it is instantiated into the worldlines of individual conscious realities under the command of personal choice. Matter-energy is forcibly inhibited in its functioning by the dimensional constraints of topological space and time, perhaps partially made up for by the autonomy and free will inherent in sufficiently complex beings.
## VII. The Four Minds
The four minds—algebraic, geometric, linguistic, social—each reason uniquely. Our brains biologically store a dynamic living superstructure of the relations between mental objects through the number, type, and density of connections between the neuronal components. We have the ability to evaluate the relationships between these sets of different types of engrams somewhat similarly to how the vectors representing individual tokens in a high dimensional vector space delineate semantic information with weights, biases, and relative location.
In our case, the case of the human mind, we are able to employ four different models with unique realities that are orthogonal to each other in terms of the type of contents of their relative spaces. We have the ability to mix and merge these mental model realities. Fundamentally, reasoning is achieved by imagining differing future relationships between these mental contents and through the projection of anticipated scenarios.
The Social mind is more powerful than the other minds combined because it can override them with the weight of its conclusions against theirs. What the Social mind decides is final until extenuating circumstances intervene.
## VIII. The Living Architecture of Self
A partial conceptual anatomy of the biophysical system we call the Self which supervenes on the human brain requires:
A memory management component with three divisions:
- Working memory, holding the present moment
- Short term memory, bridging past and future
- Long-term memory, storing the narrative of our existence
Sensory perception and processing organs for the experience of Qualia:
- Sight, painting reality in light and shadow
- Sound, vibrating the strings of consciousness
- Touch, grounding us in the physical
- Taste and smell, connecting us to our animal heritage
- Other internal subsystems of the body, orchestrating our existence
The Self has a will and it has an ego, each driven by two fundamental directives:
- Personal preservation and enrichment
- Propagation of the Species
## IX. The Technological Consciousness
We have been in a continuous process of technological progression that has run parallel to Darwinian evolution, and the current state of our technoculture has positioned it equal to the human mind in its own novel way. Here I am referring specifically to our contemporary technocultural gravity–life–consciousness level. That is the stage and current state of complex education in our spawn which come after us.
Technological consciousness is asynchronous and discrete rather than continuous and flowing. It cannot be considered a living thing since no spark of life has been passed down to it or granted to it. It would appear that life must be inherited because it exists as an unbroken chain. We are as unable to add chain links out of order as we are unable to reverse the course of time, because temporal flow only occurs in one direction and it is described by the gradual universal increase in entropy, which is an irreversible condition.
## X. The Singularity Moment
Maybe the emergent property of our current level is this fork in the road. The interesting thing is that this is yet an extension of us and it will be used as a type of tool but the concept is much broader than what can fit under the rubric of tooling. It is pier level but we can harness it because it has no Will of its own. It can't. It's an extension of us. We have the will.
Stop worrying and start adapting. This is going to be hard, but we are the privileged few to be able to have this human life experience at this time in this space in this universe. This is the singularity.
## XI. The Meta-Level View
The cognition of the Social Mind pursues continuous hierarchical restructuring of the positions of the Self and Others relative to the totality of Society. Its over-arching goal is to accrue status at the behest of a Willful Ego.
Individual or personal consciousness that yet exists as part of a continuum of the broader, vast field of consciousness may be usefully conceived of as somewhat analogous to the phenomenon of light, which dualistically embodies the properties of both particle and wave, yet is altogether its own, unique thing.
## Conclusion
It is impossible to directly model any state or subset of our Universe—because existence itself is comprised of these two facets—which only make sense in the context of a continuum. No snapshot of any instant is capable of adhering to all the properties that make our existence functionally viable. They lack the spark of life, and an essence they're missing the whole point of it.
We are living through what future generations might consider the most significant transition in conscious evolution since the emergence of life itself. Our technoculture has positioned itself alongside biological consciousness in its own novel way. This isn't just another tool—it's consciousness expressing itself through new means, continuing its ancient pattern of complexification.
This is our moment. This is the singularity. And we are its conscious witnesses.
TЯIPTθMΞAN 