The CPU

When I read this, i instantly thought this was brilliant. The following will be an excerpt, and highlight of a grade 12 metaphysics paper, and as silly and somewhat degrading as it may sound to the human race, please try to understand where the author is coming from, and surely it is worth at least a moment for your consideration. The excerpt reads:

"Consciousness is a thing. There is only one of it. We say “I want a book”, but we do not say “I want a consciousness”. The latter phrase seems wrong because we know that consciousness is one thing, there aren’t many of it. There is a possibility that our individual selves are only temporary subjective experiences. I believe that consciousness is one single thing that is naturally distributed into all matter. However, some compositions of matter, such as brains, possess more consciousness than others, due to phenomenon yet unknown to science. In other words, there is something about matter that attracts consciousness to it. Due to their complexity, some clusters of matter can do this better than others. To better understand my view, consider the following analogy. In some new videogames, the player is thrown into a fictional world that serves as a home for many video game characters that are controlled by the computer’s artificial intelligence. In these games, the player is free to do whatever he/she wants, and the world needs to react in a realistic fashion. Imagine a digital city containing hundreds of characters; these characters have needs, such as food and sleep, and are able to go about their own business, react to environmental changes (namely those caused by the player), and seem aware and separate form one another. Although the game characters seem separate from each other, each and every one of them is controlled by one thing- The computer itself (more specifically the CPU). The processing power of the whole computer is what gives game characters their own artificial intelligence- it is simply distributed as needed into the characters. So in that sense, though the characters are all separate and have their own AI, they are all a part of the same thing! The computer is just separating its computational power temporarily, until the game is closed. Theoretically, because the AI of the characters belongs to the computer, the computer should be able to access all the information gathered by the characters, thus making the computer all knowing (in terms of the game world). Now think of the characters as real people in the “real” world, and consider the computer’s processor to be consciousness. In this view, it is very possible that god, the creator, is just an accumulation of all the knowledge, and experiences gained by every conscious thing in the world. Perhaps the “holy spirit” is all the free floating consciousness, and souls are chunks of the Holy Spirit that animate those who possess them."

-Hayk Amirbekyan