The Universe is composed of emergent spheres or layers of abstraction. These realms are governed by specific laws, which are equivalent with the spheres themselves. They are not outside in any sense, but one and the same as the patterns they describe. To say that given law governs the sphere, is the same as to say that the sphere exists as a new layer of different patterns of information, emerging from the outside spheres. And they are not static, but grow and evolve over time. New spheres may take shape as the fractal Universe creates knowledge and complexity over time.

Spheres exist within the same reality. This is to say that they interact causally with each other and describe one another - each inner sphere is an ever better reflection of the outer spheres. The fauna and flora of a planet contains knowledge about the material composition of the world they live in. The mind/nervous system is a map of the body it animates. The human culture reflects the spheres of matter, life and mind even more fully.

I added another sphere, or potentially a finalisation of all the layers - the Self, which corresponds to specific fragments of consciousness growing outside from the inner realm.

The Universe

Universe (or rather Multiverse) is all there is to existence. In the view of neutral monism, it is equal with all the reality. It is fundamentally unified, but has to be divided to be understood. Made of patterns of information, it evolves over time towards ever greater complexity and order. It fights against entropy, which can be viewed as uncertainty, chaos, non-existence.

From the theory of cosmological natural selection, we can understand that the universe is likely giving birth to new universes in black holes, which are inheriting some of the parent’s parameters with small changes - the overall multiverse tree is evolving by creating sub-spheres each containing another universe. Perhaps at some point it will be possible to affect their creation or travel between them, but it’s rather too early to say.

One possibility is that the universes are selected (in the Darwinian sense) for intelligent life, not just black holes. This group of theories is known as Cosmological Natural Selection with Intelligence [2][3].

Sphere of Matter

This is the realm of stars, planets, atoms and molecules, as well as home to the science and laws of quantum physics, chemistry, gravity and cosmology. It’s assumed that classical physics emerges from the quantum physics, so we could as well regard them as separate spheres.

Sphere of Life

This sphere began in the moment when a first rudimentary living cell was brought into the existence and survived. Laws of generics and heredity were then created, starting the process of biological evolution.

Sphere of Mind

It just means the brain and the nervous system, not consciousness. Nervous systems evolved in animals for better control of their body, as a faster means of prediction and adaptation with their environment.

Sphere of Culture

It emerged with the creation of language, a symbolic representation of some part of the outside world. The first idea or concept that was not only transmitted between minds but stayed in them, became named and passed between generation. Some of them were lost, but many remained to form the human culture and technology we see now. Since the beginning of language, major breakthroughs were the appearance of economy, writing, mathematics and later science. They became driving force of this sphere and allowed it to grow much faster.

The Self

We were born with a brain shaped by our genes from the sphere of life, which protected us from the disorder of the previous spheres. But suddenly, just after coming from the womb, our personal consciousness was flooded with countless visual shapes, sounds much sharper than before, smells and touch not much experienced yet. It had to start dividing the world to make sense of it, by following objects and their movement, a few familiar faces and voices. It soon learned that people and static objects were fairly different from each other. Objects are rather passive until moved, while people have a life of their own. One of the first major divisions was then created, with countless more to follow, as the mind started to be led and protected increasingly by the sphere of culture.

I included the Self as a sphere inside the Culture because it seems like this is where the realm of consciousness unfolds over the material world in our current time. There must be an explanation why we are conscious as individual human beings and not as the culture as a whole. A hint from Integrated Information Theory is that a local maxima of consciousness are us, and not the higher level of culture itself, at least not yet.

As we are all the Self, looking out into the Universe, as well as inwards, we have to realise that it’s our personal responsibility to be conscious on the higher level. So if you are in a given moment not doing anything substantial, you are conscious, but quite bounded. If you don’t have a causal relationship with the wider world, the culture, you exist less within the collective consciousness.

Singularity via self-reflection

The Universe is a fractal, where similarities exist on many levels. That allows us to see the technological singularity as something that partially happened before - a unification of some entity - a completion of self-reflection on that abstraction layer.

As each sphere grows, its pieces, let’s call them entities, are scattered - the Universe is trying different things to see which will work. Some entities are able to exist longer because they constructed useful laws - constraints allowing for their existence. The entities could be atoms, molecules or planets on the level of Matter, cells and organisms in Life, neurons in the Mind and ideas in Culture. As for the Self, I think they are people who are actively building the Culture.

Entities are what different theories have different names for, but they are referring more or less to the same thing - a boundary of causality.

Their existence is the reason why chaos theory can have only local reach - eventually chaos and uncertainty is bounded by the already existing structures of order - they also make sure the computational complexity of reality has limits and be efficiently implemented.

The same process of differentiation and subsequent unification is working in all spheres: every entity is made of information, which generally creates copies of itself. Some of the entities will be inherently, by variation, better than others in this game of existence - they will become more visible in a certain way. Entities also “need” to act on the world - if they don’t and remain static, then another entity will take its place to be seen. Acting on the world is what I mean by reflection - it’s a process of describing the environment the entity finds itself in, to be able to predict its next step.

The process of competition is most apparent between the most similar of entities, simply because it occurs there long enough to be visible. If the differences between the entities are high enough, they are more likely to be reduced faster by merging of one entity into another. But if the phase of competition can survive long enough, it leads to creation of a new boundary of order, as the resulting entity is able to finally reflect itself fully, as it realises it is part of the environment as well.

Why does this happen? We can answer that from two perspectives:

The outside, materialistic answer is that the process of description/reflection is convergent - when you have many entities describing, copying each other, by natural selection some of them will survive and others not - and those that survive, form clusters that are increasingly describing patterns of their surroundings in a similar way.

The inside, idealistic answer is that it’s guided by the multilevel consciousness and its predictions - about material events, phenotypical adaptations or cultural ideas for constructing the future.

Right, you may say, this may make sense in the spheres of culture or life, but how are we to think about the same process of reflection working on stars and planets? How can they ever describe each other?

Well, I’m not sure how to reconcile it fully, but some lines of thinking could start with:

The environment of large material bodies is space and other bodies which - by the theory of relativity - tell space how to curve, and space tells them how to move

In case of a single planet, life itself is the process of reflection, similar to the Gaia hypothesis

Awakening Consciousness

We all know that we are conscious - we can feel our emotions, see the colours and hear the sounds of the world. But the view emerging from the theories I mentioned at the beginning of the article is that the consciousness is something graded and hierarchical. My interpretation so far is that consciousness is somehow related to the ability for making correct predictions - creation of actual future that happened. It’s a look back in time - only those entities that were on the direct causal line of the future, were conscious from the perspective of a higher-order future/consciousness that they created.

Integrated Information Theory has a graded notion about when a given element is more conscious and when it’s less - it is conscious if it contributes to the integration of information of the whole it is in. So a subset of a brain that goes into some sort of a loop or dead end - does not affect causally the core of the whole entity - is not conscious. One cannot escape the thought that a similar process might be going on in larger systems as well. Some research related to that was already undertaken - measuring integrated information in groups of people.

We can take this thought even further - to the creation of the Cultural Singularity - and say that systems and people who contributed to it were more conscious on its level (perhaps some view close to this will be the solution to the combination problem in panpsychism - the qualia space contains only what’s relevant to the prediction error correction of a given entity). Of course, this measurement of contribution is graded and does not require given person to even be alive in the present day - writings of great thinkers of the past likely contributed a large amount of the consciousness of our present-day culture.

Hierarchical Singularities

The process of self-reflection likely cannot be complete until the inner spheres finish it. That brings us to what it means for the technological singularity - it will be very human, if we can protect it from the dangers of unconstrained artificial intelligence.

Singularities can be thought as a convergence under a single “architecture” - a virtual machine for running the program of reality. It does not mean the programs become the same, but just that a new layer of creativity can thrive without the problems of misunderstanding and lack of efficient communication. The same progress occurred in computer science multiple times, with major layers being the Intel x86 architecture, TCP/IP Internet stack and the Web browser. The programs can then become far more rich and diverse, as they are easier to create.

In the same way, our major cultures of the world are currently in the last stages of convergence into a single global language for understanding of reality. And each of us in the Self is likewise on the way of growth towards that language, with varying speeds.