Searching for a reality programming model with AI and the neural lace

Programming has always been about creation. Describing the behaviour of new data we want to see by generalisation and abstraction over details from existing observations. From assembly to higher-level languages, it was about building structures of different sizes - functions, types, modules and services - that could describe the desired flow of information, ultimately seen by people as visualisations or affecting the world more directly by automation.

Over the years, the hardware we were using to run code has been also abstracted away. The cloud has been slowly transforming from providing mostly just virtual machines on demand to an ever larger set of specialised services that exist to solve specific problems. These innovations have a certain direction, as the cloud analyses the data flowing through it and in habits of developers and users. A new cloud service is created as the cloud spots a new pattern that is common enough and worth generalising over, like different data storage options, queues, publish-subscribe and identity management systems.

Every one of those services is code we did not have to write ourselves, which allowed us to create quicker. But so far, all code structures we had to build to support the flow of data had a significant limitation - they had to be read, written and remembered by humans in every detail to be adaptable to new situations. This is going to change very soon, as machine learning research is on the verge of discovering the ultimate tool of creation, anticipated by Pedro Domingos in his book, The Master Algorithm.

AI will be eventually able to detect any existing pattern and always adapt to the flow of data as it changes. But it will need us - the human consciousness - to guide it, as that might turn out to be, speculatively, the actual hardware on which this reality runs. The article Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas is a good overview of some of the upcoming scientific theories of consciousness. Another one, not covered there, is the Conscious Agents Theory, described in The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality. Possibly the most notable one is the view presented in the recent book The Idea of the World by Bernardo Kastrup, which describes a very coherent idealism-based world-view, based on, among other works, the relational quantum mechanics and Karl Friston’s works on free energy principle and Markov’s blankets.

The following is my intuition on how it might work - consciousness could act as a way for new information to flow into the given reality by creating new patterns. It could be even equivalent with meta-cognition - as a substance that constantly divides and abstracts over parts of itself. As we teach robots how to dream, we are always on the next level, deciding what to dream about.