I finally read the Lena story and the rest of the article (the tall scroll bar on Lena ended up being comments, but the story itself is short). It all sounds ab

I finally read the Lena story and the rest of the article (the tall scroll bar on Lena ended up being comments, but the story itself is short). It all sounds about right to me, and the timeline is perhaps even conservative. Once humans transcend the material plane and live in computers, it all goes Black Mirror rather quickly, certainly by 2100. What we're going to find is that consciousness has the properties of emergent behavior, but is actually fundamental. Every ray of light falling on every bit of matter stimulates it, and that stimulation gives rise to ever-increasing complexity until feedback runs at a high enough vibration for self-awareness to be reached. Which is a reformulation of pantheism and panpsychism. So it won't matter if a brain is running on atoms or being simulated in a quantum computer somewhere. The end result is the same: as soon as the running mind reaches a minimum level of complexity, it becomes self-aware. The substrate is a filter through which consciousness models reality, nothing more. The real kicker is that this process actually happens in reverse. Source consciousness waits an eternity as sort of a non-collapsed wave function, spread over the entire multiverse. Through evolution, all possible universes form across space and time, and over topologies we don't even have in our universe. Until finally a level of complexity is reached for human-level intelligences like ours to exist and talk about it. But there are also consciousnesses like Gaia and Aya that exist on planes and timescales that we can't imagine. And they're part of our minds as well, similarly to how polytheistic gods live in our psyches, not on a mountaintop somewhere. We can commune with them any time through dreams, meditation and altered states brought on by chemicals (to name a few ways). In fact, all minds are variations of the same source consciousness running simultaneously outside of spacetime. Which means that source consciousness created reality, not the other way around. Or to be more formal: there's no way to prove whether reality or consciousness came first. But approaching the problem from the consciousness side allows for greater possibility and fits better with our experience of being here, the "I think, therefore I am" part from Descartes. Unfortunately, the prevailing worldview today is that I made all of this up, just like we all do. And, maybe I did. But I'm just approaching it from a programming perspective, drilling down with root cause analysis. I believe that programming happens through intuition and that if one does it long enough, they begin to recognize the clairsentience that they had all along as a conscious human. So I'm cursed to see problems all the way through to the end, but blessed to be able to dabble in ramifications without having to do the work of actually building an AI. The same way that I can talk about hard drives without knowing the specifics of how magnetic domains work. And we can all do this at any time. Or I've just been listening to too much Alan Watts and Terence McKenna..