Examples and Metaphors

Imagine a fish tank, 1000mm wide by 1000 deep by 1000 high. The tank is filled with 1mm cubes. Inside each cube is a little scroll that says: air, gold, glass, skin, hair, cheese and such. These scrolls represent electronic memory locations that can be filled with information about real objects. Laws defining the relationships between adjacent memory spaces are programmed to be in harmony with those in nature. Such as weight, object boundaries, momentum, light refraction, texture, behavior etc. In fact, very much like current 3D modeling and animation software.

This memory space can be thought of as a movie stage - a 'Cartesian Theatre' or to use modern parlance - a virtual reality chamber. This virtual chamber can be filled with objects or environments and at any scale. Gas will disperse, liquids will spread to boundaries and solids will have weight and maintain form. Animated objects will flow according to their motion vectors and morphology - a perfect analog of real life; except matter is replaced by information. Like a 3D window or camera, this 'box' can float across virtual landscapes and environments, to be filled at one moment with the great expanses of space and time and in the next, the most intimate molecular spaces of tiny living cells.

At the centre of this chamber is a virtual, animate human character. The contents of the theatre always render down to this 2D observer perspective, which is also the source point of filling the chamber from any modality inputs. This virtual space will form the contents of waking consciousness.

Further, shadow realms exist. Again like scrolls set beside the originals, except the contents of these scrolls are able to break free from the straight jacket of modality flow. Here, the behavior of objects can follow trajectories learned from the past, together with substitutions and time discontinuities. These 'subconscious' shadow realms can leak in and out of 'consciousness' to also fill the 'stage'.

Math and Software

'The challenge is not how to use computation to deal with the real world - it is how to use the real world to deal with computation.'

Within the human mind, a teapot can be blended with a donkey! The resulting simulation can be infected with the properties of china, flesh, ice cream or whatever. Inconsistencies fade out of the scene. This ability to mechanically draw disparate objects of class, form and scale together in the most structurally consistent and plausible way, is the basic stuff of our simulation machinery. The teapot handle may detach from the lower join to become a free flowing tail and the spout, the donkey head. But through introspection, inconsistencies will come to light.

Whereas this ability does seem very powerful, it is at the same time very weak. No more than five or six attributes of a simulation can be held in focus at any one time. A simple long division would appear a somewhat trivial symbolic animation in comparison, but few are able to maintain sufficient control over the parts to achieve even this simple feat. ^9-

Math and software memories similarly exist either as animation scripts or simple learned pattern recognitions - such as multiplication tables. Like the images on a dice face, digits can have direct dot pattern equivalences for subsequent math animation (add, subtract etc.) Thus math can manifest as either image animations (e.g. joining/separating dot groups) or rely on memorized symbolic beliefs, such as 12 x 12 has 'an equivalence to' 144. Or for the binary truth tables - or should I say 'belief tables'. ^10-

Just as there are behavior scripts for the way a ball bounces, a rabbit runs and a feather floats, so there are the more abstract behavior scripts of memory indexing, for-next loops and the like. Most math and software concepts would likely exist initially as animation scripts, but as our familiarity and confidence with them grows, short cuts are taken, jumping straight from beginning to end, and so over time they become simple memory beliefs without the intermediate animations. Like when we imagine a vase falling to the ground and breaking, we jump from the initial fall to the shattered remains more through belief, than the accurate simulation of each part of the event down to each individual chard.