So consciousness is creating a self-perpetuating intelligent recurrent information transformer, abbreviated 'spirit'. I suspect that spirit is basically the world that our ancestors used to describe self-organizing software ages ago, and self-organizing software is relatively ubiquitous in societies and organisms. It's

basically an operating system that controls our organism as software that runs on our body. It controls its functions. The hierarchies of software agents, individual cells, also run software that is controlling the cell right down to the molecular level, that individual molecules that move around

because the software of the cell wants it. And it's a very interesting perspective when we think about organisms that the true invariance is not uh the shape of the organism or the individual molecules that are contributing to it or even the individual mechanisms being

implemented. The invariance is software. It's a set of principles that are being implemented by the mechanisms. So uh if you want to, this notion to be basic, central is self-organization, that structure is being built from the inside out, it's self-reinforcing and energy optimizing. That

it's software. Software in its nature is not physical, it is virtual, exists as if as a pattern in physics, but it's an invariant pattern that is able to enforce and replicate itself. And in a sense it's not the thing. Autologic software is not an object, it's a

physical law. It's when you say 'I have a word processor running on my laptop,' what you're saying is whenever I take a bunch of transistors and put them in this and this state, the following thing is going to be observed wherever you are in the

universe right and this this invariance is what we call software software is just a very very specific physical law and uh the same thing is true for the software that runs on our cells right it's basically a law like structure that says when you arrange matter and listen

this way then you are forced into a particular way so you look at it from a certain perspective with a certain resolution then you're going to observe the following succession of events and that's an invariance and this invariance is what we call

software and uh then you talk about the word agent what we simply mean is a control system for future states unlike a thermostat it only controls the present an agent is a control system that is able to model the future to some degree and this optimizing for future

states instead of present states and once we introduce this condition that the control system uh is optimal in the future we have the simplest definition of agent that we could come up with so far because all the features like beliefs desires intentions fall out of a system that models the future and tries

to optimize some future state because now you have decision-making you have intentions and beliefs exist to s

Self Perpetuating Intelligent Recurrent Information Transformer

Joscha Bach Bits

Consciousness as Self-Perpetuating Software ('Spirit')

Consciousness creates a self-perpetuating intelligent recurrent information transformer ('spirit').

Spirit is like an operating system controlling our organism and its functions down to the molecular level.

The true invariance in organisms is software, not the physical shape or molecules.

Self-organization, self-reinforcement, and energy optimization are central to this software.

Software is a virtual, invariant pattern that enforces and replicates itself; it's a physical law.

Software's invariance means predictable outcomes given specific conditions, regardless of location.

Cellular software is a law-like structure dictating events based on matter arrangement.

This invariance is what defines software.

An agent is a control system that models the future and optimizes for future states.

This future-state optimization leads to decision-making, intentions, and beliefs.