07 April 2021 (updated 07 January 2024) - James Wiles

"So it's compressing all the time the stuff that frequently appears. There is one thing, that appears all the time when the agent is interacting with its environment which is the agent itself. So just for data compression reasons it is extremely natural for this recurrent network to come up with little subnetworks that stand for the properties of the agent ... So just as a side effect of data compression during problem solving you have internal self models. Now you can use this model of the world to plan your future... Whenever it wakes up these little subnetworks that stand for itself then it is thinking about itself and it is exploring mentally the consequences of its own actions and now you tell me what is still missing in the gap to consciousness." - Juergen Schmidhuber

A living system differentiates itself from the environment and in order to survive needs to communicate/interact with the environment by taking in and, optionally, giving out information. The better the system can affect the environment the better it can survive, and to know what to do to the environment it builds internal representation of the environment as a model. This allows the system to run scenarios on the model internally instead of exposing itself to the environment every time. When a preferred internal scenario is chosen it can then do those actions on the outside world. These internal models are obviously "compressed" versions of environment. The environment is too big to fully replicate internally, so the better the compression the more information of the environment can be modelled by the system's limited internal processing ability. This is why compression is linked to intelligence.

Science is a history of creating and improving on compressed representations of reality, measured by its ability to balance how "lossless" the information is versus the compressed size of the model.

Perhaps consciousness is, in effect, the feeling of you modelling yourself inside the internal scenarios you are running.

A tree, an animal, and a person located in the external environment separated by a boundary. Within the boundary we have an internal environment with various models of the external environment, which importantly, also contains the observer doing the modeling, which can recursively model itself (or other observers doing the same). The model that offers the most survival value, is the one that has the highest accuracy of important observations, with the least amount of compute/memory needed to run/maintain the model (the best compression [1]).

A metaphysical next question can logically arise: What do you mean by "you" modelling "you"?

The answer is that it depends on what you mean by "you" - and this is the hard part - because you, to some degree, are your environment as well.

In my formulation there are at least three nested levels with which to conceptualize what "you" are.

1. Your mind

   Primarily located in your pre-frontal cortex, otherwise referred to as your conscious mind.

   This is the intelligent subset set of your neural network that generates the self-modelling imagination often felt as consciousness described above. If your consciousness models this; it is consciousness being conscious of consciousness.

2. Your brain

   This is all the rest your neural network that is not necessarily aware of itself, this could be considered your unconscious mind. When your consciousness models this; it is conscious of thinking. Here thinking is a super-set consciousness, however thinking about thinking could mean our brain is capable on consciousness.

3. Your body

   The living organism that houses the brain. Your body physically interacts with its environment, it can physically affect the neural network with neurochemicals and signals, and does some pre-processing of information before it enters the brain. You consciousness models this as an agent that might or might not be able think.

These systems above can be further nested into networks that most immediately affect and are affected by them. For example; things like possessions, such as the clothing you are wearing, or the vehicle that you are driving. Additionally "you" could be you as a person and the people you influence. "You" could be invading another country - and as such "you" could be an entire society of people.

The degree of "youness" might be related by the degree of a system's conscious ability to be conscious. Another way to think about this is if you suppose that a society could be conscious; then the society might have the ability to create models and run scenarios that involve itself, but might not necessarily model the individual people's consciousness that make up the society. So this means a society thinking about itself is more accurately thinking of itself as a "you" then the people inside the society thinking about the society as "them".

This image depicts a ensemble of observers, each with it’s own consciousness, together forming a collective consciousness. This depiction here shows the collective consciousness of an inside group of people and a boundary between an outside group of people. This ensemble model of models can act like individual consciousness of a single human, because there are enough of mechanic need to form a consciousness.

Ultimately; whichever system is modelling itself the best, is to itself the most "you", and can be whatever the you considers itself to be.

Maybe the degree of consciousness is the degree of accuracy in self-modelling behavior, with the "self" being which ever system the models are embedded in for which the model is most accurately modelling itself.