Consciousness: A Game Model

Are you connected to the universe or does it exist inside you? Why is it so hard to change, even if you want to?

I wrote this first as a comment on this post, but it got way out of hand. Initially, I cut it out of the comment and intended to expand it to be some all encompassing work of art, but fuck it. I don’t have eternity to perfect it, so here it is, raw and verbatim, with a short intro.

Like many humans, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to figure out why humans don’t make sense. Why do we believe things that are easily debunked? Why do we act against our own self interests, and why do we do such great damage to ourselves, to others and to our environments? Pulling on that thread unravelled the whole ball of yarn, leaving a messy, complex tangle of philosophy, science, language, mathematics, economics, politics, religion and all the other “-ics”, “-isms”, “-ologies” and “-ons”. Some questions turn into obsessions, for me at least, and I’ve been obsessed with weaving that tangle of yarn back into a nice sweater. I doubt I’ll ever finish it, so I’ll settle for many sets of mittens and potholders presented on Medium for now.

Also see this post touching on the role of stories in evolution, destruction and survival (don’t let the title fool you), which is part of the same model.

The comment

It’s interesting to think about how a self could be created — a consciousness. Data from sensory organs, response to photons in the eye’s photoreceptors for example, is processed subconsciously, processed, like a lot, connected and superimposed with data stored in the past and presented to the conscious mind as an image that is not “real”, and parts of it aren’t even there, now, but are fillers added from stored data to fill in what isn’t important to decision making.

How do we know what’s important? Consciousness acts as a game engine for what-if analysis where the entire game (everything an organisms knows about the universe) is set before the player (the identity, ego, representation of the organism or whichever label you want) and the player can test out actions and universal reactions. The player isn’t alone in the game. The game adds characters created similarly to images from some directly perceived data and some categorical filler data. Within a threshold (~150 people, I’ve heard), the other characters have a 1:1 relationship with people we’ve encountered in the world, but those representations are not those people, just what the game/universe knows about those people with existing data distorting and filling in gaps. In this model, the consciousness is both the player, the game and all of the characters, in order to run simulations.

Experience increases the efficiency of the simulations, strengthening the connections for shortcut paths such that we do not have to run a full simulation, just react. The stronger the emotional response in a scenario, the stronger the encoded path (memory). The specifics of the memory can be less important (fallible memory), only the bits crucial for decision making (resource efficiency).

The self is all of those — subconscious data pipeline, player, game, characters — and the identity could be thought of as the relationship between the player and everything else in the internal universe. As new data comes in, the entire landscape is updated, but not in an unconstrained “I am water” way because the well worn paths of the stronger network connections cannot simply be changed. For efficiency, the mostly automated responses execute without running full alternative simulations again. We can force the simulation again or pause the responses and simulations (meditation), but as society grows, the complexity is far too great to run all the simulations necessary enough times and with enough emotional intensity to change all of the necessary paths, even if we want to. We can, over time, bring some categories of responses under scrutiny to label them as unimportant, but that is a resource intensive, intricate process, where consciousness attempts to change the sub- and preconscious processes about which it has little direct knowledge.

So while identity, ego, specific characters and character categorization (archetypes) do constantly change, consciously directed changes have a lot to contend with, limited resources (time, energy, sufficient emotional intensity) and require rewriting pathways that have successfully kept the subject alive up to that moment. Not easy to change a single aspect and not possible to change them all.

Social media, AI and the internet in general (and economic abstractions and population increase, etc.) have increased the size and complexity of a society at a rate that they may eventually (or have already) broken the capacity for consciousness to be an effective tool for survival.

The prologue

I’m intrigued by just how little information our consciousness has about “reality” outside our bodies as well as the processes inside our bodies, and yet how certain we are that we know what is real. It is a small system inside a larger system, kept insulated from the functioning of the larger system and the perceptual data of the larger system. When we look in the mirror, we think we are that thing looking back at us, but in reality, we are a small aspect of that thing, tasked with creating stories to guide its behavior toward survival. I hate the crude analogy, but using the CEO analogy, the CEO doesn’t perform the functions of a company and sees only highly processed and curated reports and attempts to make decisions without knowledge of the vast majority of processes, largely based on what has worked in the past. Funny how we structured our businesses that way.

How our consciousness works quite literally defines everything. Because our understanding of it can only live within it, as a subset of it, it is probably impossible to understand, but I want to get as far out toward the limits of it as possible, follow the connections across any topics in the winding thread, and attempt to communicate them in the crude, ambiguous languages that are available. There’s a lot more to delve into in the comment above, and many other interesting questions the exploration could raise or (inaccurately) answer:

• What is god?
• Why isn’t therapy working?
• Why and how do psychedelics treat mental health issues?
• Why are social media and the internet cracking societies?
• Can we actually create AI? When will it kill us?
• Why is emotion required for consciousness and why can it not be separated from logic?
• How does Capitalism keep us from killing each other more often?
• Is the “capitalism” of today really not Capitalism, and is it rushing toward economic collapse?
• How you can be part of a cult and not know it? (and you are in at least one, right now)
• What is Jesus? (this is a fun one)
• Are lies a feature not a bug of consciousness?
• What is the role of story in consciousness? Did we have consciousness without them?
• Why do societies fail?