A (48:23)
Oh, well, the purpose that the intellect is serving is that it's part of our choice making process. We make choices. And I have to go back to the very beginning because we're walking in through this kind of backwards. So we're here to evolve the quality of our consciousness. The consciousness system is a real system and it's evolving. It doesn't want to devolve. Maybe I should start there and kind of work up to where we are now. And then a lot of questions will be answered. They'll fall out. All right, so let's start at the beginning. And there's two strands here that I want to do together. One of them is think of a. A system. And that is an information system, okay? Just general words, just an information system. And let's say in this information system, all the bits are random, okay? No information. Random bits defines no information. So if this information system is actually going to evolve, it has to order some of those bits. So it orders those bits in a particular way. And the ordering isn't so important as it is that once it has an order that is of certain form, it can then make that stand for a number or a letter or something else. You know, a buffalo, you know, it can make. Here's this ordering. And I will give it a meaning, okay? So it can do that. Now as soon as it does that, it orders those bits, it now has information. Okay? So what an information system does is it evolves, becomes greater, evolves by lowering its entropy. Ordering things lowers entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. So all the bits random is the highest entropy that system can have. Order things. That entropy goes down a little bit because that's how that works. So if you have an aware information system. Now this information system is conscious. It's where and it knows it has to order bits. That is its path of evolution. If it takes the bits and pulls them apart, now it's back to all random and it's dead. It's not an information system anymore. So it wants to evolve by creating more information. Those bits that are defined to be a particular way, that's information. So it wants to create information. That's. It's. So the purpose of this aware information system is to lower its entropy. So that's one thing that we have to understand. Now let's look at consciousness. A lot of people say nobody knows what consciousness it is. Consciousness is easy to define. It's an awareness with a choice. It's just that simple. It's awareness with a choice. Awareness of what's out there, what's in here, both self and of outside of whether that's awareness. Okay, now what does awareness have? How does it do that? How does it know what's in here, out there? It has to get data. So it goes out and gets data. Now, for us, that data comes through five senses. We hear it, we see it, we feel it, we smell it, we taste it. That's it. We got five senses. So our awareness has information. It gets, oh, this is an apple, this is a chair. And it learns to deal with that information. The second thing it has to have is it has to have memory. If you don't have memory, everything you notice is the first thing you've ever noticed. So to build something to evolve, you have to have memory, okay? You also have to have some processing. You have to be able to look at those things in that memory and say, well, what do they mean? What's the connection? What does this tell me? You have to make some kind of sense out of it to help you find your purpose, which is more order, lower entropy. So now we take the simplest form of consciousness. Simplest form of consciousness is remember conscious awareness. You know, awareness has memory, it has processing, it has a purpose. So that would be just a piece of aware consciousness that could be in state A or state B. That's it, binary. That's simple. It's the simplest state we can think of. So we can say, oh, I'm aware and I'm aware that I'm in state A, all right? That's an awareness. And I can change that to state B. I've got two different states. I can be in a simple binary and I can remember that. And now I can change it. Now I can change it again. Now I'm on a. I went from a 0 to a 1 to a 0 to a 1 to a 1, and I can remember that, okay? So it can evolve by creating patterns. That one, you know, that's 01, 1 0, that's a pattern. So it can make patterns and it can work with those patterns and evolve by making patterns of patterns and so on. And now it can take one. It can take just one. Well, let me put it this way. There's two ways to proceed here. And it doesn't matter which way. They all end up at the exact same place, and that is it. All. Then all the patterns of patterns of patterns created are in the memory of this cell. So it's just its memory. Or you can say, if you follow the biological model that it is, that it duplicates itself like another virtual machine, it duplicates itself. So now you have two of these, and this one's in a one and this one's in a zero and another and another. So you can do that. So one of them follows. Like our evolution here, biology. We started with single cell amoebas, and then they had multiple cell things. And then you had things that specialized, like in organs, and then you had things like us that lots of different organs and specialized stuff. And we have a. I've heard us described as a cooperative organization of about 4 trillion bacteria or 4 trillion single celled things that are all cooperating and working together. So complexity builds. So we can do that. Complexity can build with numbers of things, or it can build just in memory of things, but either one will take you to the same place. All right, so let's say this thing is growing, it's lowering its entropy, and it'll get to a point where, where it's done all the patterns of patterns of patterns that it can think to do, and it kind of stalls out, kind of hits a plateau, all right? Then it can take one of its little cells and just oscillate it from 0 to 1 to 0 to 1 to 0 to 1. Ah, it just invented a metronome. Now it can use that one just sitting there going 0 to 1 to create regular time. And now it can have sequences of patterns of patterns of sequences. It can more complexity what that does. And that's when regular time was invented. It's a technology consciousness creates. So then we have it growing. It's more and more order. And of course, it's learning as it goes, because arithmetic is a natural for this thing, right? I've got one thing, I've got two things. I've got another two things. Oh, I've got four things, you know, I mean, that's just natural. So it's going to explore that. It's going to get good at math and so on, just kind of naturally. So it's growing. It gets to a point where it's stalled out again. It hits another plateau. It's this one big monolithic consciousness now that has thought of just about everything that it can think of. It's because it's just one thing. And it realizes that in order to grow further, I need to break off pieces of myself and give them independent free will. And now, we hadn't discussed free will up to this time, but our little unit that I started with, that simple thing that was binary, had to have free will. It had to be able to choose between A or a B or a 1 or a 0. So free will was that it could freely choose which one to bring up. So anyway, so it realizes that it has to do this. Well, our cells basically did the same kind of thing. They had to split, and each one was an independent cell that now had to cooperate. So it said, I need to split. So it did. It created a bunch of virtual machines. That's what we are. We're one of those virtual machines that got it off of its plateau. Because now these virtual machines have their own free will. And the sewers can say, all right, everybody line up. Here's what we're going to do next. And they can go, eh, don't feel like it, boss, I'm going fishing. They can do their own thing now. You have a bunch of different perspectives on things, a bunch of different attitudes. And the various pieces didn't all go through the same, you know, didn't all go through the same process. They all have their own processes making their own choices in their own way. So now you're getting a much richer set of possibilities that you had when it was one monolithic thing. All right? Now this whole set, now this whole thing is growing up with its subset pieces, is what I'm calling the larger Consciousness system and the first virtual reality. And a virtual reality is simply a rule set, says, here's the rules. Everybody that obeys these rules and they're part of this reality because they can share things. The first virtual reality was protocols for language, for talking. So the system creates that all these sub pieces can communicate with each other. They have syntax, they have definition, so they can talk. So now you've got this big chat room. It's a good metaphor. And all these subsets, and the main parent is still there, and they have this communication, well, that creates a lot more opportunities for growth. But that also stalls out because the way the system works, its whole point is to lower its entropy and the possibilities that all of these things interacting with each other creates a lot of possibilities, but the possibilities aren't all that interesting. You know, after a while, you know, what do you do with 100,000 things in a big chat room? It kind of loses its novelty in a sense. So the system thinks, I needed a different virtual reality. I need one in which the choices are more. You can learn from them better by lowering your entropy. You can learn from them better because the choices are meaningful, the choices are important. And so it decided it would create the second virtual reality. And to do that, it starts with a set of initial conditions and a rule set. That set of initial conditions is this really tight, tiny little ball of plasma under extremely high pressure, extremely high temperature. And the rule set is basically what we call science, physics, chemistry, biologists, the rule set. So it comes up with this rule set, hits the run button, and that ball of plasma expands and there's gravity that's slowing it down, but it's expanding under the force and things cool and you create suns. And you've been through that big bang thing, but this is the same thing, except it's a big digital bang. It's just happening in a computer because the system needs a virtual reality. It doesn't want to program one because that comes out being stilted and disappeared. There's always going to be quirks that just got programmed in. It's not going to be really always self consistent. The only way to make it self consistent is to let it evolve. So now you have the big digital bang. And it starts out, gets just a short way and craps out, explodes, goes to hell and oh, let's change the rule set a little bit. Let's change the initial conditions a little bit. Big digital bang, take two, it gets a little further and so on until, you know, big digital bang, 100,000. Oh, it's working pretty good. I'll just need to make one more little tweak and little tweak. Now, what this says is that the system is going to tweak the system, rule set and initial conditions until it gets something that serves its purpose. Well, it's got to say. Let's say it all fell apart. Well, as we got to increase gravity a little bit, keep it together. Well, now it all sucked back into a spot. Well, we got to. Anyway, it does this and eventually it's got all the constants in a rule set working together to do something that works long enough that it can evolve something. An avatar that makes the kind of choices that have a lot of substance to them. They're meaningful choices. Okay, now that's where we've come to. That's where we are. See, so we are these pieces of consciousness, virtual machines within a larger consciousness system. And this evolution has evolved to the point that there are humans before us. There were dogs and cats and monkeys and other things, but they didn't. Their choices, what I call decision space, that's all the choices that they know. Like, any given time, you may know, oh, I have five choices here. You might really have 25, but the other 15 you don't know about, or the other 20 you don't know about. You just don't understand that those are choices of yours. So those choices that you know about that defines your decision space, you can do one of five things. Okay, well, the other creatures had small decision spaces, so they kept with the evolution and even sometimes tickered with it. You know, we have things like this in computer science labs all over the planet, in universities, where they've taken initial conditions and rule sets and let them evolve because they're trying to come to some kind of understanding. And they always tinker with the results. They get so far along and something isn't what they want, so. So they go in and tweak it a little bit out there. Well, that explains a lot of things. Now, one thing it explains is the thing called the. Let's see, what was that? The anthropic cosmology principle, cosmological principle, and what that says. And I have a little slide that I can show you where that comes from. If you've not. If you're not sure of that, There's a. I just had to tell the guy what number it is.