Consciousness as Logical Inference

Foreword

The Absolute

The absolute is that which admits to no error, it is the fixed in the volatile, it is the rule of the imagination;

It is the necessity of being itself, it is the law of reason and truth;

The absolute is what is. God himself is not without a reason for existing and can only exist by virtue of a supreme and inevitable reason.

It is therefore reason which is the absolute; it is in it which we must believe if we wish our faith to have a reasonable and solid foundation.

It is thus we may say in our day and age that God is but a hypothesis, but absolute reason is not one: it is essential to being.

Eliphas Levi, Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, 1854.

Consciousness is as perplexing as it ever was.

It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by a subjective inner life.

We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it arises, or why it exists at all.

How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system?

Present-day scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about consciousness.

We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are entirely in the dark about how consciousness fits into the natural order.

David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1996

We think humanity can understand the natural order by immersion. To do this it needs merely to overcome its fear of novelty and astonishment, what the anthropology of primitive tribes calls its misoneism.

Humans are no longer primitives. We and our social arrangements can quite readily control our instincts, most fundamentally by using gossip and even surveillance. We just need to find the generally most acceptable cultural background (times, places and methods) to refine these methods.

Philosophers distinguish two types of knowledge, knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. We accept this distinction and propose to blend them in a new and special kind of workspace. We think a positive and tested theory of natural language conversation can, when brought to popular attention, accomplish this blending on its own.

We think a fully developed knowledge of the natural order, within the Absolute, will convert terrestrial existence into something both quite desirable and cosmically novel. We think we just need to prevent our future selves from being locked away by some terrible and unreachable error committed on the way to an earthly heaven.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.