Consciousness

The moment a silicon eye can stare back into your peering eyes. Unflinching and following your every move - then, you will believe in such a thing as an artificial soul. You may be wrong, but not entirely so. We intuitively know that a thing that can break through the veil of vision; to make sense out of that mess of light and shade; to really 'see' a living, breathing human being - has crossed that Rubicon. It will actually be achieved through unconscious, mechanistic vision processing. But our intuition in this case will be right - 2D to 3D instantiation is indeed at the very heart of consciousness. (In animation, rendering is the process of converting 3D scenes to 2D bitmap images for human viewing. Instantiation, in this context, is the reverse - the conversion of 2D bitmaps back to 3D environments, this is a key concept in this paper).

Your basic human being is constructed from a virtual reality chamber connected to a carbon based, self assembling, nanotech robot with sensors. The chamber is self learning from exposure to the outside world and free will stems from a process of grading simulated predictions against pre-programmed genetic and culturally programmed schemas. Without a simulated environment running behind our eyes, we would be totally blind. The stream of data can only ever represent a series of bit maps; there is no hidden information our eyes can see that a camera can't - there is less! The images are simply used as cues in the construction of a virtual environment. The contents of that environment are actually drawn from memory and the bitmaps simply maintain simulation alignment and paint texture over the model surfaces. The experience of consciousness is bound to that simulation.