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PART I

NATURAL REALITY

Through senses, needs, actions, and consequences we are bound to something we call ‘external world, reality, or universe.’

What is man, how does he perceive, represent, move, think, change the world, change himself?

Is there a world independent of the individual, and what relationships exist between this hypothetical world — external and autonomous of the individual — and the subjective world constructed mentally?

We can ask ourselves, we can suggest answers, we can verify, correct, and use them, and the verifiable-usable answers indicate the capacity of the human mind to construct linguistic models of reality or of the individual.

1.1 The universe, an informational system

We can regard the world as an assemblage of parts, relations, and activating energies independent of the subject, resting on a material substrate from whose microstructure and micro-interactivity all macro-forms and macro-changes of reality derive.

We can also conceive of our world as an informational spectacle unfolding only within the agent that assembles it. The appreciation of the world as existence autonomous of the subject is the simplest and most accepted hypothesis; it leads to considering the individual as a special part of reality which, through its interactive features, can construct its own variant of reality and a model of itself placed within this model of reality.

If we treat the world as the effect of an informational modeling, we have several alternatives: namely to consider ourselves the informational system that receives the message bearing the states of reality from somewhere but interprets and particularizes it through its own functions; to allocate to ourselves the complete creativity of nature, to be authors of the reality-messages and interpreters of them; or to accept that both we and the universe we perceive and represent are simulated in another informational system whose presence and creative-interactive characteristics we do not yet identify as distinct from the world in which we find ourselves.

Under the hypothesis that we are receivers and interpreters of reality-messages, several questions arise concerning the source of the phenomenal message, and concerning the appearance and processing qualities of ourselves as perceivers, explorers, and users of the representation extracted from the message.

We cannot allocate to ourselves the role of authors of the reality-message, because if we knew how to make it, we would no longer be what we are — we would no longer have such dependence on a world that we ourselves would be producing, and we would not be so ignorant regarding its composition and its functional-causal mechanism.

If we hypothesize that there exists yet another informational system distinct from those of biosystems, where the spectacle of the subject coupled to the universe is created and unfolds, being unable to prove by any experiment the existence of this supersystem, we remain only at the stage of an assumption that is in no way arguable or testable.

Therefore the assumption that nature and man are informational states developed within a supersystem that models the subject and is real within the subject remains a fiction — but a plausible one, which the future may demonstrate as valid or false.

From the reception and processing of reality-messages by the model of the subject, our physical world results — ‘external and believed independent of us’ — and from the reception and interpretation of the obscure messages bearing apparent, substantive, and functional individuality, our modeled self extracts its corporeal, interactive, and intellective support and projects it into the external reality extracted from the carrier informational message.

If we consider ourselves to be that informational system in which reality and our body acquire structure, functions, and cognitive performances, we encounter insurmountable obstacles in defining our own existential status, and in explaining how we are capable of making an entire world, of constructing a self, of populating it with individuals resembling the one that we are, yet knowing nothing about the manner in which we created and brought into manifestation the world and our person.

If we prefer to treat ourselves as the effect of the functioning of another informational system — one that simulates person and world within person — the explanatory difficulties are maintained, only they transfer to that hypothetical ‘absolute creative supersystem’ which can produce such an informational individuality, itself capable of receiving in message and distinctly modalizing a reality and an individuality situated in reality.

In an informational reality, ‘substance, energy, form, and motion’ are the effects of interpretive procedures applied to messages with a certain content, and the subject itself is the effect of a super-interpretation of a subject-bearing message. The modeled world ‘does not exist’ in the way that the real phenomenal world exists, informational existence being a ‘dependent’ existence — an existence created by the subject and particularized through the subject, as opposed to the hypothetical authentic existence, that existence presumed to be structurally, interactively, and causally autonomous of the individual.

1.2 Genetic informational media

Nature possesses a very ingenious and high-performing method of creation, realized through the biosystemic project. Each individual carries its structure and behavioral characteristics in a macromolecular chain, arranged so as to store the information of its morphological and functional composition.

Creation through molecular ordering of the individualizing features of an object endowed with interactivity is remarkably efficient; it permits an enormous structural and interactive variability.

When we learn how to construct genetic projects for all kinds of morphologies and specialized functions, we will overcome the most complicated and subtle barrier to understanding and recreating ourselves in that variant of individuality we desire — but we could also produce an entirely new range of tools, genetically created.

Current informational systems could probably be replaced in the future with genetically created systems, either as independent processing units with which we could connect linguistically or directly intentionally, or as parts added to our organism or added to other beings, augmenting certain performances and making them useful in a determined way.

Somehow, in the genetic project, nature found a way to experiment with the reflection of itself at different levels of detail and phenomenal self-correlation, to reconstitute itself causally, structurally, and dynamically, developing the biosystems that can perceive it, somehow modalize it through representations, change it through the functional conditioning of actions in the environment, and ‘become-aware-and-know’ through the intentional construction of informational models of reality.

In a biosystem, reality partially reconstructs itself, attributes to itself a modal and evolutionary variant, through the intermediary of an interpretive aggregate that can detect its messages bearing phenomenal aspects, translate them into meaning-representations, and act upon these meaning-realities through other meaning-actions of the gestural and linguistic operands. Thus the universe experiments upon itself, modifying itself not through what we might call purely causal triggering of phenomenally transforming energies, but through the ordering of sequences of micro-energies that have become informational-phenomenal states, treatable as models of reality experienceable only informationally.

The informational simulation of variants of itself through the intermediary of living beings bestows upon substantive and radiant nature a new and extremely interesting existential dimension — reality appearing capable of effectively self-expressing as macro-phenomenality, yet constructing variants of itself through simulations of phenomenality, organizing itself as a global creative informational supersystem where variants of universe are modeled rather than effectively released.

From this perspective, a scientific theory created by man could be compared to a certain living creature possessing a creative genetic information of a distinct reality. This information, submerged in an adequate interpretive conceptual medium, creates an objectually interactive reality that is only simulated — in representation, in language, and in causalizing conceptuality.

The constructive interpretive medium in which the being-theory, regarded as genetic information, can become a simulated being-reality — deployable modally and interactively only informationally — is causally the human subject possessing perceptual-representational aptitudes and dynamic, linguistic, and rationally investigative performances capable of taking the theory as base information, attributing reality to it, and transposing into modeled phenomenality its creative personality of reality.

Along this path, we could someday create models of informational being-realities, with theoretically-creative individuality predetermined, which we would introduce as seeds of universe into informational supersystems, where they could germinate as radiant super-explosions — as we believe our universe came into manifestation — or, choosing other beginnings, then develop them progressively, traversing the stages of star genesis, galactic macro-formations, planetary synthesis, the appearance of different living beings on these model planets, and their evolution up to the stage at which they too will be able to conceptually construct that theory which, as the initial informational genetic model bearing reality, gave them birth.

When we possess a genetic theory sufficiently diverse and coherently causal-modeling of reality aspects, it would be possible to realize within an informational system an entire universe with the composition and dynamics of the one in which we find ourselves — to obtain models of planetary systems on which life appears in the variant known to us, to take simulated life through all evolutionary stages to the point of the appearance of conscious individuals resembling, corporeally, morphologically, and behaviorally, authentic humans — individuals capable of perception, representation, knowledge, and valuing and affective relationship in their exclusively informational world.

If the initiation and expansion of informational worlds were achievable, then someday we could become creators of all kinds of unreal realities, sustaining persons without personality but personalized, who perceive reality-messages and represent them as their own models of reality, yet believe they perceive substantive forms and qualities belonging to objective worlds, external to and independent of their mentally phenomenalizing presence and attributes.

The assembly of algorithms capable of generating a perceptual, linguistic, and interactively cognitive individuality — of extracting from a message bearing ‘modality’ (for example a message bearing video-interpretable information) a representation of world, then describing it linguistically and considering it external to and independent of their perception and thought — would offer a functional understanding of the mental processes that define our individuality, providing an informational model of how we perceive, represent, speak, understand speech, and use it as an instrument for investigating and causally describing our world.

PART II

INFORMATIONAL REALITY

2.1 The predicates of reality

Man is capable of many relations and orientations toward his world — gestural, linguistic, intellective, and affective — and it is plausible to assume that they appeared in a certain order determined by the conditions required for the composition, functioning, and conscious awareness of their modal particularity.

Gesture, although it appears homogeneous as a reality-transforming procedure, is hierarchizable into spontaneous gesture and intentional gesture; intentional gesture can in turn be differentiated into autonomous gesture, motivated by the author’s intention, and conditioned gesture; conditioned gesture can itself be split into internal conditioning, through the author, or external, determined by the environment.

External conditionings can themselves be different — namely natural conditionings or conditionings by other individualities — and the possibility of differentiating gestures by the types of conditioning that particularize, trigger, inhibit, or modify them can be nuanced almost without limit.

In the space of language we have even more hierarchies and conditionings — micro, medium, or macro signifying, descriptive, and interpretive — ranging from unilateral or bilateral dependencies in the construction and relating of meanings, to dependencies between linguistic descriptions and interpretations, or operative hierarchies that produce certain techniques, discourses, and cognitive performances.

Beginning from the meanings of words, there is a priority in the appearance of different words in language, conditioned by their generative mechanisms.

Thus words of the ‘noun’ type, which name and isolate forms, should appear before ‘predicate’ words, which identify and modally quantify-signify changes of state of forms, for several reasons. The algorithm for recognizing an object, which participates in the construction of a noun-meaning, is simpler and easier to compose as a chain of operands than the algorithm for identifying a motion. The recognition of motion presupposes the identification of the agent-noun that takes up or generates the motion, and therefore includes the form-identification algorithm.

The correct and stable recognition of a motion over certain time intervals further requires the algorithm’s capacity to conserve the recognition of that motion even when inevitable modifications of the supporting form, trajectory, or relational changes correlated with other motions that it influences or is influenced by appear.

In reality there exists a variability of forms and motions which either determines clear and permanent differences in both classes, or permits the identification of common cores of modal similarity — either static or dynamic — on the basis of which both forms and motions can be grouped into families of similarity or invariance, constructed upon common characterizing parameters.

The external world possesses an extreme diversity that can be analyzed and organized through algorithms for identifying invariance cores; this is how our mind operates when it recognizes objects or motions, systematically applying comparing, evaluating, classifying, and unifying strategies of modalities, which permit the construction of similarity families for the majority of forms and changes — reducing the number of word-meanings while covering the entire structural, relational, and dynamic diversity of reality.

The algorithms for identifying the forms and motions of nature must distinguish between modal differences that differentiate and individualize and differences that unify, possessing comparing and classifying procedures performant enough to construct groups of similarities, with the help of which they will bring together forms or motions with common invariance cores, or will perform unique recognitions where warranted.

A recognized motion, to be separable as the same, must either have its modal characteristic conserved over the recognition interval — the identifying algorithm being able to treat as equivalent predetermined variations in certain parameters of the change. Situations can arise where a certain motion, changing some of its characteristics, may be identified as a distinct motion by a less efficient algorithm; this happens with people of different identifying abilities, there being complicated motions that require an exceptional analytical competence to be treatable as similar, even though to an unprepared eye and intellect they appear different.

The reverse situation is also possible — that is, some motions appear similar to an untrained eye and intellect, but become distinct for an individual capable of more efficient dynamic and relational observation and analysis.

Man can recognize as similar or different complicated motions that contain both conservations and limited variations of modality within the interval of perception and representation, but such recognitions of dynamically fluctuating modality, subtly unifiable or modally differentiable, imply the presence of an evolved language possessing a diversity of semantic nuances, through which the subject can allocate distinct name-meanings to different modal nuances of form, relation, motion, or correlation between them.

Only through signification do we believe that any recognition of modal invariance or difference, static or dynamic, is correctly, rapidly, and stably achievable.

We assume that motion in a broad modal diversity, translatable into ‘predicate-meaning,’ is the essential constituent of any language — the complexity, let us say structural but especially conditioned and conditioning, of stably signifiable motions being an index of the degree of interactive and linguistic performance of the user of a language.

We will conventionally separate several generic predicates and order them hierarchically, making the hypothesis that these predicates cover the entire range of actions-changes or configurations created intentionally, which man can identify, realize, discover, analyze, communicate, or receive on request from his fellows.

These predicates, called generic or generalizing, encompass the entire dynamic diversity of reality, of the body, and of the mind of the subject; through them the individual separates reality into invariance families, acts upon reality, acts linguistically upon itself and upon its fellows, as a creative intentional agent.

We have chosen six generalized predicates, six types of action, each characterizing a distinct human behavior.

To ‘perceive and represent’ reality, to ‘act’ upon reality, to ‘speak’ — that is, to linguistically compose reality and action in reality, to ‘understand’ spoken descriptions, to ‘know’ about what, when, and how we speak or understand, and to ‘know that we know’ — in what state we find ourselves at each moment: these are the predicates that, we believe, cover the totality of actions in the real or in the intellect, defining the normally functional human being.

We believe these predicates cover the entire human amplitude of identification and description-communication, as well as the generation of phenomenal or conceptual state changes, through them constructing variants of nature or individuality with individualized structural and behavioral features.

Each new predicate installed and used brings a leap of personalization, determines a growth in the self-situating, interactive, and reality-and-self-evaluating capacity of the individual.

All the enumerated predicates require different amplitudes of consciousness from the user.

Consciousness is the most transparent and the most obscure human quality, but also that of other beings.

We are always conscious of something, we are conscious that we are conscious of something, we are conscious that we can be conscious of a diversity of situations or only of our own consciousness, but we are never conscious of the manner in which we become or are made conscious — at the generative, particular, or generalized level.

Our consciousness makes conscious but does not make itself conscious in making itself conscious; it allows us to introduce into the field of modal identification and characterization a diversity of forms, motions, qualities, and conditionings, but it does not allow us to consciously enter our own consciousness-making algorithm and observe and understand in what manner we become conscious with different extensions and hierarchizations between consciousnesses, through what micro-actions and combinations of mental micro-actions we allocate or are allocated specific, nonspecific, or hierarchically specifying consciousness.

In fact this operative obscurity, this prohibition of entry into the hypothetical consciousness-making and personalizing algorithms, applies to the totality of processing states unfolding in our mind.

We can perceive through each sense, but we cannot also perceive and functionally explicate perception; we can represent — that is, modalize the reality deposited in each sensory message — but we do not know how we construct the modal states, how we generate the video forms, audio forms, and so forth, and the corresponding motions.

We can allocate meanings and speak, but we do not know in what manner we attribute meanings when we speak, or allocate proper meanings to different received messages when we understand speech, not understanding the manner in which we understand.

We can ‘know’ — that is, possess or create certain information, partially consciously — but we do not know how we perform those mental actions through which we evoke something by appealing to memory, do not know how we ingeniously combine information, discovering a new state description with utilizable potential.

These prohibitions of penetration and understanding of what happens in our mind when we perceive, represent, act, speak, understand, or know are ultimately natural and necessary, if we consider that the ordinary person, as well as the person with the highest current scientific specialization, does not yet possess sufficient information to correctly understand functionally what happens down to the last detail even in perception — while in representation, in speech, understanding, and knowledge, the available process-explaining information is insufficient and still confused.

If we were witnesses to the event of ‘perception,’ the phenomenal-causal identification and understanding of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with the sensitive cells of the eye, or of air oscillations in the auditory receptors, or of different molecules with the olfactory or gustatory analyzers, would require an exceptional scientific knowledge that very few of our fellows possess.

If we could enter supra-perceptually into the technologies of meaning and language generation, possessing current knowledge, we would certainly witness an attractive but strange spectacle in which we would understand almost nothing of what happens when we produce or understand a linguistic message.

And participation in the genesis of representation — that is, in the construction of modality through the processing of sensory messages — would be a fascinating but difficult-to-understand spectacle, assuming we were somehow capable of supra-perceptually following the circulation of sensory messages to the brain and of observing and understanding informationally the mental strategies that assemble reality.

Concerning the analysis and detailed understanding of cognitive procedures, there can be no question using the information accessible to the ordinary person, as long as the most ingenious linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and computer scientists — but not only they — are trying to discover or to imagine and verify what events unfold in our mind when, using language, we ask and answer a question or formulate and solve a problem.

Regarding consciousness, we all identify this quality in ourselves, all or most of us attribute it also to our fellows, and that is about all we can do, not knowing anything about how consciousness appears and how it focuses on intervals of reality or levels of personality, always bestowing upon us the individuality, consciousness, intentionality, and appropriate action that express us in accord with ourselves, at every moment.

It is not at all certain that if we were to become conscious of the generation of consciousness — if such a thing is possible — we would remain conscious in the human way, or would receive a self-reflecting state totally different from all the kinds of consciousness to which we have access.

We do not know what consciousness is, how it acts in its consciousness-making role, the algorithmic procedure that attributes consciousness, whether there is one consciousness-making algorithm or many; we can only describe it qualitatively and have the impression that we have understood something that is still incomprehensible.

Qualitatively, consciousness is the systematic possibility of the subject to localize itself specifically or unitarily, to detach from any individualizing localization and treat the identity of self as part of a new extended or individualizing and self-evaluatively modified identity of self.

Consciousness appears to be the ability to continually fragment our entire subject into subject-parts and manipulate these parts of our person as we manipulate real objects and motions, constructing from the conscious decompositions of each self a new whole subject, which in turn is divisible into subject components, manipulable and reconfigurable into another whole subject.

Through consciousness man localizes and manipulates himself as if he were something different from himself. Consciousness ‘systematically de-subjectivizes,’ translating the subject into object, bringing the consciousness-making self into the position of conscious content — identifiable, manipulable, and intentionally modifiable.

Through consciousness we continuously re-individualize ourselves using parts from more recent or older variants of individuality — which conscious-parts, in different combinations, produce a new unitary consciousness that satisfies only the demand of a momentary subjectivization, but which loses its necessity and value as soon as a new present changes the conditionings and demands the assembly of another subject, compatible with another reality.

Through consciousness, ‘metaphorically,’ the individual destroys and continuously rebuilds itself, and through itself demolishes and rebuilds its own world — no variant of individuality and of reality within individuality being able to persist without blocking the flow of correspondences between momentary individualizations and realities.

The construction, consciousness, consumption, assumption, and permanent metabolization of a new variant of personality, through the remaking of consciousness, maintain the ever-present subjectivity — ever conscious of the self in existence, detached from the variant deposited in the past and available for the reception of any future self.

Without the systematic self-dissolution through ‘consciousness that destroys ante-consciousness’ and the composition of a new ‘self’ through re-consciousness, we would irreversibly detach from the world and from the individual that contains and expresses us.

Through consciousness the subject can act upon a variant of self as upon a form-entity distinct from the newly created self; any assumed and consciously grasped self becomes an impersonal object, consciously controllable but lacking its own consciousness, fallen from the status of self equal to itself to the state of a part of the self — assumable or removable without the destruction of the self equal to itself.

Obviously through the above we have not said something remarkable; we will try to detail as much as we can a hypothetical consciousness-making procedure when we discuss the conscious extension required by each type of predicate.

The series of predicates that we believe localizes individuality in its behavioral, gestural, and linguistic diversity is:

—To see, to represent, implying the totality of representations,

—To do, to act,

—To speak, to communicate,

—To understand, to interpret,

—To know, to configure,

—To know that you know, to identify knowledge.

We have chosen the predicate ‘to see,’ which in fact localizes only a part of the detection and representation of our world, as the encompassing predicate of the totality of reality’s modes, because sight and image offer consciousness the most ample, complete, and detailed ‘external world’ — the world of images being, we might say, the base reality of the majority of people. In image we receive the greatest diversity and modal complexity, which determines the majority of our options, actions, and consequences.

Obviously the normally functioning person operates continuously on all channels of perception and representation, and effective reality is a unitary aggregate with five modal dimensions, where image, sound, taste, smell, and tactility, as reality specificities, interweave, condition, complete, and reciprocally explicate each other — and the absence of a perception is frustrating, forbidding the individual access to a part of nature or individuality that can offer both satisfactions and deceptions, but which can be a source of questions, problems, and attempts at answers.

Before describing — evidently only qualitatively — what we believe informationally particularizes each predicate, we make a compact characterization of them so as to offer from the start a project of investigative intention, the realization of the project depending on our ability to say something relevant.

1. To see is the informational action that attributes video modality to the radiant message bearing reality. The image is the effect of the interpretation and, we might say, the modalization of the radiant message.

2. To do is the intentional action upon parts of reality — but a nonspecific action, systematically specifiable through placing an effectively configuring interactive predicate in the place of the generic predicate that encompasses it.

Man can develop particular gestures and combinations of gestures with distinct effects, but all gestural actions fall within the invariance family of the all-absorbing and meta-qualifying motion proper to the predicate ‘I do,’ which is why we have chosen this predicate as the defining and unifying meaning of the totality of gestural actions.

3. To speak is the first higher predicate that separates and linguistically individualizes the subject, attributing to it the ‘making of reality,’ distinct from the extraction of reality produced through the predicate ‘I see,’ or from the changing of reality accomplished through ‘I do.’

To speak is an extremely complicated creative action of reality; the reality generated linguistically only seemingly resembles or somehow recomposes in other terms the reality of perception. In the world of language there is not and cannot be the fragmentation, solitude, and structural and dynamic chaos of representation; language is an organizing agent of stable reality components, but above all it creates an ample network of conditionings between all parts of reality, whether forms or motions. Linguistic reality is a mechanism, a unitary behavior whose detail and coherence depend on the linguistic subject — but the linguistic world always possesses an internal causality, expressed through the totality of conditionings between all its parts, which the user of language can discern, stabilize, and apply to reality.

In fact ‘linguistic reality’ is an incorrect formulation: there exist linguistically individualized realities, there exist only personal linguistic worlds, these being constructions of the subject — obviously each personalized linguistic reality borrows through communication parts from the linguistic worlds of other subjects.

Linguistic reality is modalized non-representationally, through meanings, and meanings are operands that can manipulate and connect — according to syntactic and semantic rules — the content of the different families of structural, kinetic, relational, and interactive invariants. Any meaning takes up, equates, and communicates the amplitude of the modal similarity of that invariance family containing the modal states that the individual can bring together, using specific identifying, comparing, and classifying criteria.

Qualitatively, ‘to speak’ attributes ‘seeing and doing,’ individualizing the subject through two generic predicates interactively coupled, creative and communicative of modality and action.

4. The generalized predicate ‘to understand.’ The predicate of understanding has an exceptional importance; it extracts and reconstitutes a variant of reality from spoken messages.

To understand means to signify, to allocate modality to speech, and this allocation of reality to discursiveness is a kind of ‘seeing-representation’ in the space of the forms of language.

To see resembles to understand as extraction-allocation of reality to a carrier message, and to speak is comparable to to do — both being modality-assembling predicates: to do uses components of representation, to speak connects meanings, the signifying forms of representation.

To do and to speak are creative procedures of reality, while ‘to see and to understand’ are consequences of interpretive procedures applied to a reality-bearing message.

5. The predicate ‘to know.’ This higher predicate characterizes the subject’s capacity to intentionally create the desired reality using pure gesture and linguistic gesture. To know allocates to the subject a multiple and flexible consciousness — controllable, hierarchizable, and partially allocable to other subjects. In the operative space of the predicate ‘I know,’ the subject can linguistically model subjects capable of understanding, speech, doing, and seeing-representation of reality.

6. The predicate ‘to know that you know’ closes the series of individualizing procedures; it develops a subject capable of attributing to itself and attributing to all other individuals all the predicates, allocating to itself and to its fellows the same amplitude of consciousness and the same linguistic and cognitive capacity.

7. There exists one more predicate only partially accessible to man, namely the predicate ‘to know how you know.’ To know how indicates the subject’s possibility of constructing a knowledge of a particular knowledge — to show through what operative stages it passes when it performs a certain action with a determined effect.

To know how has investigative limits, dependent on the object of knowledge.

We can represent, but we cannot yet know how we represent.

We can do something, but only in part can we know how we do it — for example, we can describe all the gestural states through which we achieve a configuration, but we cannot enter the informational mechanisms that trigger our gestures and adapt them to the manipulated forms and motions.

We can speak and explain what kind of meanings we allocate to each word using other meanings, but we do not know precisely how the mental algorithms that effectively allocate meanings or extract meanings from received messages function.

We can ‘know’ how to ask a question and we ‘know’ how to answer it, but we ‘cannot yet know’ what happens in detail in our mind as a succession of operative states when we formulate a question or when we search for and possibly find its answer.

At the limit, this predicate would characterize the subject’s hypothetical capacity to penetrate and informationally understand the procedures of representation, meaning allocation, discourse construction, and its understanding — but also the knowledge of the composition of all the supposed humanizing algorithms that allocate to us intentionality, consciousness, interactivity, specific creativity, and affectivity-emotionality.

The question about the significance of the word ‘to know’ was posed several millennia ago and has received various answers, but in none of them are explicit cognitive mechanisms offered that would lead to a certain cognitive capability and particularity — a natural fact given that we cannot enter the space of mental cognitive processes and observe, name-signify the different state changes that unfold there together with their effects translated into cognitive acts, expressible gesturally or linguistically.

Our brain seems to be somehow multi-personalizing: one part acts as a generator of dependency-individuality, another as an assembler of dependency-resolving personality, and another as a valuing entity of dependency and solution. This means there exists in us a mechanism that can model an individual who has needs, who sensorially identifies and linguistically translates reality-dependencies, formulating these dependencies as questions, as requests for action toward itself or toward others, for the satisfaction of need.

There also exists a knowing-subject-modeling mechanism that can identify the type of satisfying action for a certain need or request for modality from the dependent subject.

The third modeling procedure constructs a subject capable of evaluation and allocation of ‘values’ to both dependencies and satisfying-resolving actions.

If we knew how each variety-of-subject modeling mechanism is assembled and how it acts in its individualizing role — the dependent-problematizing, the knowing-resolving, and the evaluating-valuing — we could say that we ‘know how we know,’ that we are capable of identifying and informationally explicating, correctly and completely, all the processes that allocate to us representability, construction of meanings and descriptions of reality in language, the use of language as a knowing tool, the formulation of problem-situations and of solution-actions for them.

If we could construct a physical or informational individual endowed with perceptive functions representant of phenomenal message, possessing natural language, capable of constructing and understanding linguistic discourses, endowed with the performance of problematization-knowing, of identifying dependencies and resolving them — if we could further allocate to this entirely constructed individuality those meta-algorithms that would allow it to identify and understand, operatively and hierarchically correlated, all its personalizing mechanisms, each offering it a behavioral and conscious interval — we would perhaps achieve a simplified variant of self-knowledge.

With the creation of informational systems, man understood that he is in possession of that technological medium where he will be able to effectively reconstitute — not merely discursively — all his perceptual, representational, conceptual, and perhaps affective qualities, but only if he can understand himself functionally in the informational mode, if he discovers in what manner to semantically compose and process-interpret information in order to obtain in the modeling system all the sensory, dynamic, linguistic, intellective, and cognitive states that define the real subject.

The distinction between man and his own informational systems is initiative — it is ‘self-situatability,’ the property of self-positioning and self-activating specifically as a function of one’s own states and the states of the environment, of triggering transforming actions in the real or societal domain, in order to conserve all one’s personalizing, metabolic, sensory, dynamic, intellective, and emotive characteristics.

Millennia ago man identified the quality of initiative and meta-initiative — that is, of initiative upon initiative — this meta-activation of self being offered by consciousness and by the unlimited extension of the consciousness of conscious states.

Dependent on reality yet capable of temporarily detaching from this bond in order to be himself, man began to ask and answer the questions:

—How is the world?

—How is he, in what ways is he similar to and different from the world?

—From what ’cause’ is the world causally correlatable?

—Through what, through whom, in what manner, is he thus created, capable of so many different actions and so many consequences?

The answers have been numerous and increasingly better, more encompassing of verifiable explanations — especially when they proposed the description and causalization of the phenomenal mechanism — but they have also been quite ingenious and satisfying when they analyzed, decomposed into prime factors, and explained the being, giving it the impression that ‘it knows that it is, knows what or who it is and could also know how it is, know through what or through whom’ it finds itself as it does.

The entire human knowledge of each historical moment has tried and still tries to answer these ancient fundamental questions, and at present this knowledge has such a diversity and explanatory, theoretical, experiential, and interpretive complexity that no person, however talented, can research and understand everything that all fellows know about the real universe and about the universe of man.

In very many directions the mind has traveled seeking to encompass and understand the world, and in even more directions desiring to understand itself, and the paths traversed have revealed forms, connections, energies, and possibilities ever stranger, ever more distant from the premises or expectations that triggered the searches.

For the investigation of reality, it seems that man has found the appropriate exploratory tool, composed of gesture and word in close cooperation. Gesture experiments, modifying reality; the word reconstitutes structurally and relationally and explains the effects of gestures — but the word too can experiment, can conceptually construct experiments and analyze probable consequences.

It is strange that the mind, which shows its astonishing ability to imagine, research, and causally explain in so many ways, refuses — for obscure reasons — to be equally cognitively efficient when it proposes to observe and understand itself, to offer itself its composition and the creative mechanisms of its performances.

The fact that the mind is so little capable of offering itself a coherent functional model is not ‘explained’ by a willed or obligated self-ignorance, there being no internal or external, natural or superhuman self-cognitive obstacle placed before the mind by an uncontrollable power.

The difficulty of the process of functional modeling of the mind by the mind arises from the informational conditions required to make this self-knowledge possible, from the inevaluable changes of personality resulting from the construction of a personality that can informationally self-personalize.

There are many and justified causes through which we know our own being so slowly and partially, but we must not conclude for a moment that there exist causal prohibitions of any kind in the path of any knowledge of nature or of our being.

The principal obstacle to the knowledge of the self is our momentary ‘self,’ which cannot surpass its condition — that is, cannot receive more than it can want, nor want more than it can take up and carry without collapsing.

2.2 The relationship of the subject with reality

A virtual world can simulate all the micro-corpuscular and radiant characteristics and all the macroscopic compositions of natural reality, on the condition that we can describe its fundamental components and interactive laws, and construct the informational medium that takes up and interprets the formal model of reality, where the world contained in the model unfolds modally and interactively.

The possibility of achieving the independence of reality from the subject while conserving modality — that is, the particularization of forms, properties, and events in the absence of the subject — is not at all as simple as it seems, and could be a contradictory requirement upon careful analysis.

The philosopher-researcher of past millennia or centuries identified the obligatory relationship between modality and the modalizing agent — that is, between, let us say, ‘the form of the world’ and ‘the attributor of form to the world,’ which is the subject.

Incontestably, something enters the senses for a representation to result, and this something must come from somewhere, must have an existence detached from and unconditioned by the subject — otherwise the subject would have to produce both the phenomenal-bearing message and the phenomenality, and in this double position, reality would be as it desires, not so unpredictable and sometimes opposed to its options, as the real world is in relation to the individual’s expectations.

But the assumption that what we represent somehow has a similar but independent-of-us correspondent in reality is evidently false.

If, for example, we look at a landscape from a distance, we observe the constituent elements without detail, and as we approach, the eye receives ever more information and the representation becomes more detailed and enriched.

Making a correspondence between everything we perceive-represent and what should be outside us in each of these representations, it would result that reality exists in a multitude of useless and contradictory variants. There are billions of subjects who each see the world distinctly and differently, yet strangely each has access only to its own reality — this resulting from the fact that there always seem to be controversies both about the content of representations and especially about the connections that each of us allocates to them.

If all the representational variants of all individuals existed simultaneously, we should each see in all the variants in which the others see, admitting that what each one sees has a distinct and autonomous existence, in principle accessible to any perception and representation.

But each person sees each of the momentarily discriminated forms and motions in a single variant, as if the multitude of alternatives of each modality — as each separates it and hypothetically exists autonomously of him — did not exist except for a single subject, or were forbidden to the perception of the others.

In no case can we claim that each proper representation of reality has a modal correspondent independent of the subject, because such a reality would be extremely redundant, and its distinct perception and representation would be practically impossible.

Another argument for the nonexistence of modalized reality independent of the subject comes from the diversity and opposability of some of our knowledges about reality, assuming a correspondence between the reality derivable from a phenomenal theory and autonomous phenomenality.

Having at our disposal certain observations, experiments, and a certain explanatory potential, we can construct a certain causal theory of natural phenomenality that can satisfy us for millennia, centuries, or decades, in the absence of something more precise.

But when we change the content of observation, modify experiments, and especially when we propose other interactive and formalizing relations between the new fundamental components of reality, we obtain a new world with another composition and another processuality.

Is it plausible to believe that as long as a certain causalizing theory was accepted, there also existed a corresponding autonomous reality, and when we invented a new structural-evolutionary theory, the old reality disappeared and the new one appeared, possessing other micro- and macroscopic modalities, to which the new structural-interactive hypotheses apply?

Can we suppose that during the time interval in which we constructed and accepted a certain reality-generating hypothesis, autonomous reality was effectively as we supposed it — that is, it contained independently of us all the hypothetically allocated forms and interactions, and these disappeared irreversibly and were replaced with others when we changed the paradigm?

Such reasonings make us doubt that personal reality and autonomous reality are the same thing, but they do not allow us to somehow clarify what the autonomous world might be, what kind of correspondences there could be between its parts and the parts of representable or conceivable reality.

This impasse in the analysis and characterization of the autonomous world was noted millennia ago by philosophers, who declared that the autonomous world, named by Kant the ‘world in itself,’ is sensorially inexplorable and intellectually intangible, being in principle unrepresentable and unknowable.

Arrived here, the metaphysician puts a full stop to our research and hope of structural-causal understanding of the possible independent world, the ‘world in itself,’ declaring that all we can say about it is that it might exist, that ‘it should exist’ to justify the phenomenal world — but what the autonomous world would actually be like remains an unsolvable mystery.

In the creation of a phenomenal world and subject through the informational path, the problem of reality autonomous of the individual receives a precise and complete resolution — that is, the virtual subject can discover where and how the reality-messages are created, and can further discover in what manner it is constructed as an interpretive medium, how complicated a simulation of individuality lies at the base of its personality.

But the attainment of this stage of the virtual’s self-knowledge implies that we ourselves have arrived at that knowledge of who we are which offers us the means to simulate a personality with such precision and knowing-processing amplitude that we encompass in this model of individual all our humanizing qualities.

2.3 Internal reality

The simulated world and person of the six predicates is not a video synthesis projectable on a screen where some heroes resembling those in video games go through various adventures, partially controlled by instructions attributing dynamic capability but interactively oriented by human players.

If we want to construct a virtual world and virtual subjects to populate it, it must have modality only for them, and for its creator it will be only an ensemble of programs for constructing a personality capable of pseudo-perception, representation, and linguistic interaction.

At present, any kind of forms and motions can be informationally constructed with a detail and structural and kinetic coherence we might call natural; a great variety of forms and motions can be recognized — but attempts at personalizing a synthesis, recognition, or video interaction program are still at their beginning.

We do not know whether the created recognition algorithms somehow modally separate the identified forms and motions, but it is doubtful that ‘representability’ would appear in the identification procedures currently achievable.

Our world contains three-dimensional material forms; these are irradiated with fluxes of electromagnetic oscillations having a certain frequency band; the radiation is selectively scattered depending on the position, size, color, direction, and illumination intensity of each surface.

The human video analyzer collects a part of the radiant message, and the specialized zones interpret it as modality — as distinct form, color, position, or motion — on the basis of objectualizing-dynamizing strategies that can differ from one subject to another.

If we could conceive of ourselves from outside (in the sense of sensory coupling with our world, to which we spontaneously allocate structure and motion) — but if we were capable of identifying how the radiant messages appear phenomenally, or through what kind of operative procedures they are constructed, how the reality-bearing information is composed and introduced into them; if we further knew in what manner a perceptual organ and mechanism and a representational action of virtual sensory message can be informationally simulated; if we could attribute to virtual subjects linguistically signifying, descriptive, communicating, and discourse-interpreting performance; and if we could further bestow upon the modeled subjects dynamic and linguistic interactive autonomy through consciousness and intentionalization — we would be in relation to our world as we would be with a virtual world and personality hypothetically modeled in a computer.

Respecting the condition that without a subject reality modal does not and cannot exist — whether real or virtual — for a synthesis world to unfold in a synthesis personality, the latter must have at least a part of human attributes: to perceive, represent, become conscious, and intentionally act upon the reality offering to which it has access.

But if a hypothetical programmer could write the algorithms that assemble video reality-bearing messages, simulate perception, representation, consciousness, and the interactive subject-reality coupling, it would be interesting that this human programmer could not know in what manner the subjects created by him receive and experience the world they receive and modalize.

Human subjects see, represent, and communicate reality to each other, but no person can experience another’s perception and representations. Probably this incapacity to borrow the representational mechanism and modalize the impressions of one’s fellow determined the appearance of language — this astonishing creative instrument that allows us to compose and broadcast reality, but a signified reality, much different from the one received through the senses and objectivized in representation.

To make something that is modally inaccessible to you in the way it is to someone created by you seems an impossibility and a realizing contradiction — but it is not so if we analyze the situation more carefully.

Man produces a multitude of tools but is never capable of substituting itself for them structurally and especially functionally, in the sense that the tool has a morphology and sometimes an energetic and environment-transforming potential different from and as a rule inaccessible to the individual.

What the classical tool lacks, but which increasingly diversely belongs to the informational tool, is a degree of operative autonomy — obviously attributable by the programmer — which gives the tool the possibility of carrying out operative chains of any length without human intervention, and sometimes of using the results of processing to achieve other processing states of a higher hierarchical level.

Man perceives and represents natural messages as reality, attributes to reality a causality dependent on his observing, gestural, and cognitive performance, acts unconsciously or consciously upon the world respecting the causality he can discern and apply either through learning from experience or through the construction of a formal, quantitative model of natural states.

For the hypothetical ‘virtual subject’ to behave similarly, it would need to possess all human attributes — a fact difficult to achieve as long as we do not know how to model the morphologies and functions that personalize.

We admit, however, that before long we will create pseudo-conscious and intentional operative programs, but we do not yet dare to believe that we could assemble too soon a subject possessing affectivity similar to the human kind — but someday our models of individuals will have this quality too, being autonomous beings endowed with everything human, yet being like human thoughts, not like the material forms that create and bear the human.

CHAPTER 3

PREDICATE 1 — ‘TO SEE’

The predicate of the generation and identification of representation

The transformation of phenomenal signals detected by the senses into an ‘objectual and processual external world,’ composed of forms, motions, properties, and interactive particularities — here is a human attribute at once natural and strange, still not understood as a modalizing informational process.

The eyes gather and the mind processes and “imaginalizes” the radiant information; the result is the multitude of surfaces, volumes, and colors that surround us — but each sense offers us a distinct world, with specific forms and events.

Surrounded by images, sounds, and all kinds of other impressions, we believe that everything distinctly perceived and represented consists of effective presences, forms and qualities ‘existing independently’ of us, outside our body and thought — modal states autonomous of the individual, constituting what we call ‘objective reality.’

Under the hypothesis of the existence of an objective world, autonomous of any individual, sensory messages and their interpretations reconstitute in the subject — partially or completely — reality; that is, they furnish us with forms similar or equivalent to the natural ones, rather than inventing them, there being an absolute universe, different from the relative universes represented and conceptualized by subjects.

This absolute universe, independent of all subjects, possesses a structural and dynamic characteristic that is intrinsic, existentially distinct from the existence of the subjective worlds that unfold modally in human minds.

To the hypothesis of autonomous reality — existentially and possibly modally distinct from human representations — various objections can be raised.

The person who is perceptually and conceptually mature, capable of discerning around himself a diversity of boundaries and events and of believing them all to exist independently of the perceptual and structurally-dynamically particularizing action of his mind, ignores the fact that every construction of form or natural change results from an informational process of interpreting a distinct message. Without the processing system, without the input information, but above all without the interpretive procedure, there do not appear in the system-subject the states of form, motion, relation, and so on — each particularity of representation being the consequence of a mode of treating-interpreting certain information.

If the phenomenal world as we externalize it is the effect of a processing state unfolding in an interpreter system, its use as a model for conceiving an autonomous world is illegitimate.

Form and change, in whatever sensory and interpretive interval they might be assembled, are a processing function of the system, an effect of an operative performance proper to an informational system.

The detachment of reality — defined as a totality of forms and events — from the subject, and its treatment as reality autonomous of the subject, is equivalent to the assertion that the functional states of the subject which create variants of reality exist as realities autonomous of the subject — an evidently impossible assertion.

Form in any modal variant is a creation of the individual, an effect of an interpretive procedure applied to phenomenal message; it cannot be detached from the creating subject and existentialized autonomously.

Consequently, the assertion that something similar to the effects of the processing-representational actions of the mind exists independently of the mind is equivalent to the assertion that there exist interpretive actions but it is not necessary that an interpreting system also exist — that there exist representations but no representational procedure and system.

One can further claim that the world as we represent and think it derives from an ‘autonomous world uncharacterizable modally,’ a ‘world in itself,’ as the metaphysician names it.

According to the philosopher, this ‘world in itself,’ different from the world within the subject, is not reflected and cannot be reflected modally as it is, in the senses and minds of any kind of subject, regardless of what sensory and interpretively modalizing performance it might possess.

But this assertion too has weaknesses.

If the senses and mind offer us a certain reality, but we suppose that the world constructed by the mind is incomparable with the source world, it follows that the senses and mind in fact do not use the received information in any way and invent a form of reality without any connection to the reality that communicates itself to the sense through natural messages. If we construct the form of reality — whether video, audio, or in some other way — without taking into account the corresponding sensory message, it would mean that we can continuously modalize reality as we do, but by blocking the functioning of all senses: thus we can generate images with closed eyes, hear without using the ears, feel sensations of taste or smell without receiving from the environment the corresponding chemical messages and without processing them sensorially and mentally.

Obviously, such assemblages of reality-pictures do not occur except in dream states, but no one considers dreams to be mental actions forming autonomous reality; the conclusion being that there should exist a connection between what we perceive and the source that offers us the reality-bearing messages.

Thus we find ourselves in an impasse of modality allocation, because we can suppose neither the existence of a modal reality distinct from any subject, nor can we admit without entering into contradictions that there exists an external world independent of the individual, yet one that is incomparable with subjective worlds — completely different from all represented or conceptualized worlds.

The problem of the modal characterization — that is, the specifically structural and dynamic characterization of reality, but of objective reality, distinct from the multitude of represented worlds — has been and remains difficult, because as soon as we attribute ‘form’ to reality, the subject’s operative modality-creating capability enters into action, form being a consequence of the processing functions of the subject’s mind, which we cannot detach from the subject and consider autonomous.

And if we remove represented form from the repertoire of particularizing procedures of ‘autonomous reality,’ but also remove any linguistic, intellective construction used to aggregate a, let us say, abstractly autonomous reality, we must find something else — something different from everything the subject can construct modally, whether concretely objectual or linguistically formal — an evidently contradictory condition, the subject being unable to propose variants of reality different from those extracted from representations or described in language.

There are people who can see sounds, or taste both colors and sounds, just as there are people who see or hear smells, chromatically see tactile, gustatory, or olfactory states, and vice versa. This quality suggests that there exist several interpretively modalizing strategies for sensory messages, proper to humans but perhaps also to other creatures, each potentially applicable to any kind of sensory message but effectively functioning selectively in normal subjects — that is, each modalizing procedure interprets and objectualizes distinctly only the offering of a single sense. Thus the image-generating strategy applies only to the video message created in the eye, the sound-differentiating one processes audio messages, and so on.

These specialized interpretively modalizing strategies, generators of distinct representations, can in principle be applied to any kind of sensory messages, the result being that we can somehow see the messages of all senses, but can also hear, taste, or smell them — each interpretive procedure becoming a kind of universal reality analyzer and creator that can allocate modality to all variants of sensory input.

When a certain strategy broadens its area of operation and applies to other sensory inputs, something strange and unnatural but not informationally abnormal happens: the subject begins to see as chromatic distributions either sounds or other sensory inputs, to hear images, or to taste or smell them — to translate all sensory messages through the same modalizing procedure.

On the basis of these extensions of modality extraction from any kind of message — not just from certain messages — accomplished by individuals who possess the function of interpretive multiplicity for each sensory message, we can conclude that there does not exist a unique reality independent of the subject, processable and distinctly modalizable through only a single representational strategy.

We can assume that there exists only a variety of messages bearing certain information which we can process in different ways and extract all kinds of distinct modalities.

The way in which man sees reality at different moments of his perceptual and intellective development supports this hypothesis, the separation of a certain video, audio, and so forth variant generating a momentary variant, modifiable over time.

The modalizing procedures have a history of hundreds of millennia, but they are continuously modified, both in the course of the historical evolution of humanity and during the subject’s lifetime — representing nature in one way during the different phases of childhood and differently in adolescence or maturity. We can conceive of a multitude of learning procedures for the construction of representation, from which different modal variants can result, all compatible with the same phenomenal message.

Let us not forget that man, like any other creature, is specifically dependent on nature, needing certain parts and qualities of the environment to survive, and what is useful to man also constructs his modalizing particularity — that is, it offers him a base of objectualization and processualization that differentiates and processingly optimizes those modalizing strategies that extract or intensify the modal features ensuring survival.

The senses have the role of collecting information about the structure and properties of forms, about temperature and other parameters of the environment, and the mind has the role of interpreting-representing them and offering us phenomenal pictures to which we allocate levels of acceptability, utility, neutrality, or dangerousness, through objectualizing, qualifying, and evaluating strategies.

Since different creatures maintain their metabolic and interactive functions using different components of nature, it is natural for each individual to possess a certain modalizing-representational characteristic, adapted to the rapid and precise separation of the necessary, but also to the identification and avoidance of the harmful.

To increase the speed and yield of utility discrimination, each individual particularizes as precisely as possible, with many details, what interests it, allocating to the rest of the ambient message a vaguer objectualization and eventiveness — but sufficient to be able to identify the appearance of a new situation containing utility or aggressiveness.

Man has the greatest perceptual-exploratory range and the most diverse and efficient strategies for learning the construction and use of representations, being capable of discerning — as he matures perceptually and linguistically — a great variety of forms, relations, qualities, and conditionings between them.

Within man’s interval of distinct modalization and objectualization enters all of nature, but also what we might call ‘socialized reality,’ composed of the multitude of tools and the modes of their construction and use.

For an animal, a tool is a difficult operative act — although some species can construct and use rudimentary tools — but for man the tool has become a part of the morphology and dynamics of his being, reaching a level of structural and functional detail so high and specific that practically no person can act without tools, yet neither can any cover operatively the entire range of available tools.

If the space of morphologies and functional modes of tools is so vast that it cannot be controlled by a single person, it is natural that representations — especially kinetic ones — differ as a function of the subject’s capability to decompose and understand them structurally and functionally.

It can be accepted that each person sees natural reality — but especially cultural, scientific, technological, and social reality — in a modally distinct way, as a function of their preparation, of the types of assembly and manipulation of the different particularizing or reality-transforming configurations.

We can conclude, on the basis of numerous observations and experiments investigating the recognition and manipulation of forms, that each creature possesses its own algorithms for the construction and manipulation of modality — from which it follows that a hypothetical unique ambient information is modalized differently in different individualizations.

If a person observing the environment can discern as a modal invariant a tree, a house, a car, a tool, or any form for which they have a stable modalizing program, for an animal the same natural messages are interpreted differently, dependent on the utilizing capability that amplifies or attenuates modalizing features, necessarily personalizing reality.

From the above we can conclude that the way in which we separate boundaries and motions is individual and temporary, dependent on a certain utilizing, satisfying, and evaluating perspective — and the unique natural reality is more of an illusion than an authentic and autonomous existence.

The paradoxes of reality

Looking in all directions we identify different objects, some at rest and others in motion, all positioned in what we call space-time — space being a kind of three-dimensional boundless support that can hypothetically take on any number of forms, and time being the unlimited multiplication of spaces to host configuration variants of forms and bring into manifestation ‘motion.’ Space contains form and time contains the state changes of form; it makes possible the appearance and transformation of any configuration situatable in space.

Identifying our physical body as a substantial form having a three-dimensional surface and an internal morphology, we treat this body as the creator and bearer of our personality: it is the source of perception, phenomenal modalization, gestural and linguistic action, and of the operative and valuing strategies through which we satisfy our needs and particularize ourselves affectively.

At present it is accepted that the structural and dynamic aspect of external reality is the result of the senses’ collection of a phenomenal message and its mental processing, the result being the world that surrounds and encompasses us. External reality, like the physical person, is constructed informationally in what we might call the interpreting-representing medium of the human mind.

As a processing-interpreting medium, the human mind is an informational system that can receive information, process it, and extract from it aspects of reality. These mentally created models of reality are taken by the person without specialized training — or, let us say, the non-philosopher — to be reality itself: that is, an external world, different from the individual, unconnected to him in any way, that is, autonomous.

If ‘external reality’ is a mental simulation, it cannot be made without the presence of at least two distinct functional states: one would be the functional state proper to the senses, which collect the reality-bearing information; the second would be the interpreting-modalizing mechanism, understood as a hypothetical algorithm or ensemble of algorithms specifically assembling representations of reality.

If this point of view about our mind as an interpreting-simulating medium of form, spatiality, temporality, and event is correct, the entire natural exteriority composed of objects and events is in fact a reality only apparently external, actually unfolding only in our mind. From this perspective, forms, motions, exteriority, spatiality, and temporality are ingenious objectual, relational, and evolutionary modal simulations realized by the mental algorithms, and external reality is everything we can modally access through senses and mental instruments.

But if represented forms are mental constructions, we have to choose — as we have already said — whether they come from messages broadcast by authentically real forms, autonomous of us (a hypothesis creating difficult problems), or to admit only the autonomous existence of reality-bearing messages, leaving their source unelucidated until we acquire a more precise knowledge of the provenance of the reality-bearing information.

People have also proposed the idealist perspective on the provenance of reality, according to which the natural world is created internally — that is, mentally — being the sole reality. The idealists do not concern themselves with securing a source for the reality-bearing message, or they simplify the creative scheme of reality-message by attributing them to an absolute creator, all-capable, about whose generative actions of reality or subject nothing can be affirmed, apart from the declaration that he exists and acts, the effects of his action being the individual and the reality within the individual.

If we admit that everything we represent is a mental construction resulting from the reception and processing of a message bearing modality — whether objectual or subjectual-objectual — several paradoxical conclusions follow.

Our body, with the composition and functions we attribute to it, being a product of the mind, cannot itself be the author of the mind and personality. If it were so, it would acquire a dual and contradictory character: it would be both a producer of personality and states of personality, but also a product of a prior, pre-existing personality that would have to receive a certain physical body message and particularize it modally, giving rise to the body we perceive-represent with its morphology and the multitude of its behaviors.

The first implausible conclusion would be that the physical form of the body as we represent it, being produced mentally through the interpretation of a message bearing form information, does not generate any of the functions through which we manifest ourselves — since everything we represent and conceptualize about representations are effects of the functions of a mind that must pre-exist the representations of corporeality and external reality.

If the body in representation is not the authentic author of the personality we assume, the conclusion would be either that there exists a body distinct from the represented physical body — which would be the effective author of the corporeality and personality we attribute to ourselves — or, in another explanatory variant, that we originate from an obscure, uninvestigable, and unknowable creative act.

Under the assumption that our person is created within another person, the one we identify as ourselves has no intellective function through itself, just as our represented physical body — in fact a pseudo-physical body, mentally constructed — has no functional performance: it does not move through itself, does not act, and does not relate in any way through itself to the simulacrum of world that it believes to be objective and autonomous.

If the accessible body and the assumable person are not effectively active — do not through themselves create the states and the world in which we find ourselves and which individualize and existentially motivate us — the introduction of another personality, different from the one we identify and assume, becomes inevitable.

This, let us say, meta-personality can be treated in two variants:

We can treat the hypothetical subject from which we originate just as we treat ourselves — that is, as a product of yet another personality, which in turn derives from another — unfolding an endless chain of individualities that cannot create themselves and need others, an impossible chain if we do not somewhere find a first link from which the following ones appear.

Or we treat the source subject as a personality different from the one we assume and situated in a different world.

The human being that we are is positioned through perception and representation in a world of real forms upon which we can act transformingly, but which we cannot create merely by thinking a modal variant, nor modally change by imagining that we would want them to be otherwise.

Unable to create or destroy real forms as we wish, we conclude that our world penetrates us rather than emerging from us; the penetration of reality into the subject, regardless of how, allocates to it the quality of autonomous world, existentially independent of all our creative functions.

But man also has creative capacity — he can imagine only mental phenomenal worlds, evidently using as material the external and autonomous phenomenality.

Let us suppose we were capable of imagining a natural reality with such structural and interactive details that, by combining them adequately, we would construct morphologies and functions in the imagined phenomenality resembling those in the world believed to be real and autonomous — which in fact is also a mentally constructed world, but on the basis of operations and rules to which we have no access. That is, we make the world but do not know how; but we could also make the world in full and complete procedural knowledge — that is, we would possess the creative rules for each micro-detail and each combination between micro-details from which progressively mini- and macro-details would result, with distinct morphologies and operative modes.

If we possessed the generative rules for fundamental components and the rules for combining them to obtain different configurations and interactions, and if some of the mentally constructed configurations possessed those functional states from which perception, representation, linguistic conceptualization, and affectivity would result, we would be the authors of realities and individualities constructed only intellectively — or better said, only informationally.

In this variant, for that type of supra-individuality in whose mind the reality message is constructed and sent toward a person created in the same mind, where it is represented as effective world, there would no longer exist external and autonomous worlds — but neither would there exist a human-type person, the person who identifies itself, situates itself in an external world, and assumes it, but who is generatively unknown to itself.

If we could mentally construct that series of micro-states and those rules for the specific connection of micro-states from which all kinds of pseudo-macro-morphologies and pseudo-macro-functions would result — such as the subject’s body morphology, its perception, representational procedures, the phenomenal aspect of reality in the subject, its linguistic description, its causal analysis, all consciously reflected in a simulated subject — we would become an individuality different from what we are; we would be a subject generating reality-messages and creating subjects who can receive and represent these messages.

In the new variant there would no longer be a single ‘assumed self’ that is generatively unknown; there would no longer be a single external and autonomous reality belonging to the unique self; there would no longer be a single consciousness capable of differentiating the states of reality and relating them to the unique self.

In the case of generating selves and reality-messages within a subject, this subject would be composed of the multitude of selves it can model and maintain active simultaneously, and each of these selves would possess its own world originating from the carrier message it receives.

But what could we say about the supra-self that possesses such modeling capabilities?

It is no longer a person in the human sense; it no longer possesses a consciousness that makes something conscious but does not make itself conscious; it is no longer situated in a reality with which to interact directly, factually, or indirectly through language. What the self-creating-selves possesses that is entirely new is its multi-consciousness — the performance of a distributable consciousness, such that there exists a supra-consciousness creating any number of variants of mere consciousness. The supra-consciousness would attribute consciousnesses to the simulated selves, and their consciousnesses would offer the subjects external worlds and allow the simulated individuals to discern themselves from those realities and to involve themselves in certain sectors of them, to choose their action targets and configuring strategies.

The supra-consciousness that attributes consciousnesses but does not make something distinct conscious is for now only a name without a distinct meaning — but it could become a systematic human property when we know what it means to attribute a consciousness and fill that consciousness with different contents, producing a subject and a world in the subject, to which the subject relates as to an external reality and in which it involves itself intentionally-operatively.

If we suppose that human subjectivity emerges from a supra-subjectivity capable of self-subjectivizing — that is, of producing, activating, and maintaining its self-consciousness-making mechanisms and its multi-modeling programs of individual and reality in individual — but we further admit that we are so made as to be able to receive and understand constructively and functionally the creative procedure from which we result, we must be capable of accepting that the world and the person we believe ourselves to be can be, in their entirety, operative states of super-minds and super-individualizations, with which we can progressively identify ourselves.

In this scheme of mental creativity of personality and reality, the self-determined individuality would mentally construct an algorithm generating phenomenal messages, another for interpretation and representation, and a consciousness-making algorithm, from which would result the modeled subject — which externalizes forms and events, attributes to itself all kinds of relations with them, but does not know how they appear or through how many interpretive stages the information passes, from whose processing its person and the world in which it believes itself are assembled and put into function.

What we are — only a mental state, in this fictive hypothesis — is merely a simulation of subject carried out by a hypothetical self-determined supra-subject, and our autonomous world is, at its origin, a generative program; it is, in continuation, a world-message; and finally, through an interpretive procedure, it becomes an objectual-evolutionary world in the consciousness that was allocated to us by the super-subject.

In this hypothesis, no human reflection of object, natural process, or subject possesses the self-determining and self-activating characteristic that we attribute to the parts of our world — just as an individual in a film does not feel, think, or have sentiments, although it seems to have all these qualities, and just as a car in a film does not have an authentic motor, does not develop energy, does not consume fuel, and does not emit emissions, although we identify all these qualities in the image.

If we could construct a virtual subject, both corporeal and intellective, its body and morphology, but also all its informational states, would be functional states for it but only pseudo-functional states for the creator — meaning they would be only interpretations of messages bearing such modalities, but that these merely represented states are not themselves capable of self-assembling; they cease to be reflected modal states when the algorithm that assembles them or the interpretive-modalizing procedure stops functioning.

At present we can neither admit, nor reject, nor somehow demonstrate whether or not we are merely an impression of corporeality and personality attributed through individuality-simulating processes — but we have no other way to construct a corporeal virtual subjectuality, or at least this seems the most accessible.

Several differences between natural, authentically phenomenal reality — where we find ourselves — and the hypothetically simulated world must be emphasized.

In the natural world all bodies are three-dimensional, volumetrically substantial — possessing matter throughout the volume bounded by the perceived and represented surface — even if the internal microstructure of these bodies is generally inaccessible to the senses and representation.

Receiving perceptually only a part of the surface aspect of a body and nothing of its opaque interiority, we exploit in representation extremely little of the potentially available phenomenalizing information.

In the case of generating a virtual reality, we construct and send to the virtual sensors and representational algorithms only that part of the form’s boundary optically accessible from the observation position; the rest we ignore, since it is not legitimately accessible to the perceiving-interpreting system.

In this virtual creative alternative, the detected and represented forms do not have volume, as long as they are perceived only as surfaces, but they can immediately acquire internal modality if the investigating algorithm is coupled with parts of the form’s interior.

And when a certain ‘virtual’ form leaves the perceptual-modalizing horizon of the representational program, the form-message generative algorithm should also cease functioning, because without the interpreting receptor the modal message no longer has meaning — it does not become reality in a pseudo-subject.

Thus virtual forms exist only when the messages that carry them are received and processed, and cease to ‘exist’ when the subject interrupts its modalizing action.

It would be interesting if our world were the same — that is, if all forms and events ‘existed’ only as long as someone perceives and somehow represents the message that carries them, and if different parts of nature or nature as a whole, treated as a finite totality of forms and motions, ceases to be when all the interpreters of the different ‘reality’-bearing messages disappear.

Reality for the subject and autonomous reality.

Discussing the simulation of the representation and positioning of an intentionally operative subject in this message-reality, metaphysical questions appear, millennia old.

From the most ancient times man understood that reality comes through the senses, and the senses can function or not in the detection of a certain object. When the object ‘enters a certain sense,’ man has a ‘specific representation’; when the sensory channel containing a certain objectual state closes through lack of signal or through reorientation of perception, the object disappears — but disappears only as representation, continuing ‘to exist’ as autonomous form in the reality existentially independent of the individual.

To characterize the continuous presence of the object in its world — whether perceived or not — the predicate ‘exists’ was created, signifying the continuity of the situating of forms in phenomenal space.

From the human point of view, ‘to exist’ has several nuances.

1. We have ‘unmediated existence’ communicated by perception and explicated in a specific representational picture.

2. We have existence from one’s own memory, where a certain object has been recorded and preserved, memory being the support for the construction of a biography of the object’s dynamics.

3. We generate factual existences by changing the structure of representation.

4. We achieve ‘deduced existence’ through the application of a certain relational-causal analysis in a certain space of reality, which demonstrates the necessity of a not-yet-observed existence, or indicates the probable existential mode of a future event.

5. We could add imagined existence, the result of the human subject’s capability to invent and describe in language natural or socio-interactive realities, composed of subjects and behaviors placed in different pictures of reality, also created.

6. We have the transfer of existences assembled in language between subjects who communicate different personal experiences or experiences received from others, which can become or are an object of interest for those to whom they are communicated. The transfer of realities covers the entire existential range: direct, memorized, configured, conceptually deduced, or mentally created.

After, through the extension of attributing presence beyond perception, objects received the quality of ‘exists’ even between states of perceiving, a natural question appears: how exactly are objects — if we admit that they are — when we do not observe-represent them?

This question about the modality of ‘existence outside of representation’ could be considered one of the seeds of the development of metaphysical thought, orienting the intellect toward the definition of a generalized existential modality of reality, both in observation-representation and outside it.

To extend the characteristic of existence beyond observation means to attribute modality — regardless of the specificity of modality — to something without modality, given that without having a representation ‘of something,’ that ‘something’ has no effective existential discrimination to receive the quality of ‘determined existent.’

The attribution of existential modality to the object autonomous of the subject was one of the classic philosophical difficulties.

The German philosopher Kant is the one who clearly introduced the status of dual existence: namely ‘effective existence, perceived and represented,’ defined as ‘the existence of the object for the subject,’ or ‘phenomenal existence’; and that existential modality of reality autonomous of the subject, called ‘existence in itself.’

The existence in itself of reality, not being the result of perception and representation, is presumed unknowable.

Other, more categorical philosophers, not wishing to complicate the discourse with the analysis of the consequences of hypotheses about an unknowable yet somehow self-manifesting reality ‘in itself and for itself,’ independent of the individual, proposed the thesis that the world is real only in the subject, only as an impression of reality that does not exist outside of and autonomously from the subject.

Given the unreasonableness — for the common person — of the metaphysical solution of ‘annihilating the world,’ of transforming what seemed evident, necessary, and authentically real into something dependent on the subject’s senses and imagination (putting the existence of the subject itself in danger), the hypothesis of reality only in and for the subject was rejected as extreme and unacceptable.

Discussions about ‘the existence of something’ require a clarification of the significance of the predicate ‘exists.’

Something exists from a certain point of view, as a representation in a subject — but what status of existential mode must we allocate to representation, the basis for characterizing existence?

Representation exists too, but evidently it does not exist independently of the subject; and if we use representation as an argument for the autonomous existence of the object, we enter a confusion of existentiating — given that we use an existence dependent on the subject to suppose and argue an existence autonomous of the subject. But if representation, as a state of the subject dependent on the individual, cannot be used to ground the autonomous existence of reality, what other channel for establishing ‘existence independent of the subject’ remains to us?

The question is difficult and does not yet have a unanimously accepted answer. We can use the mind’s conceptual characteristic — creative of models and phenomenal predictions — to argue the existence of the universe outside of and independently of the observer, but no reasoning demonstrates that the world is autonomous in the variant of ‘objectivization from representation or from conceptualization.’

The word ‘exists’ is an informational state of the human subject, a predicate operator with a certain descriptive potential — a description without attribution of modality, if we can accept such a thing.

The question is whether we can attribute ‘existence’ in the general mode, without a specification of modality — saying that ‘something exists’ without further concerning ourselves with the mode in which it exists.

Viewed informationally, the predicate ‘exists,’ like any other word-meaning, is a functional state of an algorithm for identifying the presence of a form invariant of any kind. ‘Exists’ could be a generalized operator that confirms the presence of an object in the observing field of the representation-creating system.

Existence without an existent has no meaning; to exist means to be present as a specific invariant in representation, in memory, in concept, in action, in communication, and so on.

‘Exists’ is the effect of the functioning of an algorithmic aggregate capable of form recognition, representation of form-mode, and linguistic description-communication of the presence of objectual states with any characteristic of invariance in a segment of representation.

The extension of the attribution of existence without the reception of a message and the effective detection of the presence of an objectual or conceptual invariant in the representational picture, or in a certain operative linguistic segment, is incorrect.

Without a subject there is no representation; without representation there is no describable phenomenal referential in which the subject situates itself and activates its function of recognizing specific invariant modes, generalizable as presences through a single confirmation operator, namely the predicate ‘exists.’

Existence as action has two aspects: physical and conceptual.

Conceptual action divides into:

—The identifying-communicating-interpreting procedure of modality,

—The descriptive-transforming procedure of modality.

The predicate ‘exists’ describes-communicates the action of identifying modality, and to attribute ‘existence’ without a discriminated existent, to something presumed existent, is an extension of possibility — a ‘potential existence’ that becomes ‘effective existence’ when demonstrated.

If the attribution of ‘exists’ defines a perceptual-descriptive-linguistic state, an interpretation of a reality-message, regardless of the identified and ‘existentiated’ content, then to attribute ‘existence’ without the action of localizing-representing a generalizable object invariant, situatable in a space within a group of invariance spaces, is an unsupported, irrelevant assertion.

The informational characterizing state ‘exists’ is a condition of the perceptual and intellective functional presence of the subject — a reality-existence, but one in which the subject ‘does not exist,’ is an impossibility.

The question concerns the mechanism of generating the attribution of existence — namely, what functional mode of an informational system can relevantly attribute the characteristic of existence. Several levels of attributing ‘existence’ can be constructed, but probably none covers the algorithm of human existentiating.

If we assemble a procedure for recognizing forms and motions, we can create an algorithm that attributes the word ‘exists’ to any specific recognition of an object.

If the system possesses a language generator, the attribution of existence can be extended into the linguistic space through the declaration ‘exists,’ generated automatically or on request, for any identification or identification-interpretation of a word or string of words in a description of a mode of reality.

Man does not attribute existence so simply: he makes conscious the recognition of modality, makes conscious the ‘attribution of existence’ to the identified mode, makes conscious the interpretation of a description of modality with any content, and makes himself conscious as an ‘existent of higher rank’ — attributor and interpreter of modes of existence.

For the identified and interpreted virtual forms to ‘exist and be describable and communicable’ from the point of view of the virtual subject, it is necessary to model all the conditions of existence manifestation from the human phenomenal-linguistic space. The virtual must have a video body equipped with reality sensors, must have an internal morphology generating the pseudo-functions that ensure the subject’s perception, motion, and intellective performance, and must possess the capability of using human natural language and specialized languages.

Our universe is a morpho-functional totality comprising billions of stars, planets, and other objects.

But the message of a modeled world cannot contain more information than the interpreting-representing programs can process at a given moment. There are as many realities as there are active subjects — that is, subjects who perceive and represent video — each receiving a partial message of reality and action in reality.

If the virtual world is, as substrate, a message, and as phenomenality, an interpretation of message, in this world an action impossible in natural reality becomes possible — namely, the creation of reality by the virtual subject.

When the simulated individual is permitted access to the reality-message-creating algorithms, it could offer itself the world it desires — but once having reached such a stage of knowledge and creation, the individual can enter into conflict with itself, with its world, and with its virtual fellows, if it uses its access to the reality-message generators to manipulate the form and dynamics of its world according to its desires — possibly against the desires of its fellows.

A few virtual particularities:

In the virtual world there do not ‘exist’ objects and processes independent of the perceiving interpreter; here as many variants of reality are constructed as there are subjects who perceive-represent, act, and communicate at a given moment.

2. In the natural world there exists what we call existential continuity — understood as continuous existence, the presence of the object both during an observation and in the absence of one.

The virtual object fluctuates existentially: it exists as a message only when a perceptual and representational algorithm is functioning, but disappears as a message the moment detection and processing of the message cease.

3. In the virtual world, even the individual has a variable presence and personalizing amplitude; it can function in several individualizing intervals:

As long as it only perceives and represents modalizing messages, the virtual possesses a minimal personality, explicated through the predicate of representation, ‘to see.’

—When the virtual becomes gesturally active — that is, receives the capability to interact through gesture with the represented forms — its personality is extended, receiving also the predicate ‘to do.’

—When the virtual has access to linguistic messages and can describe and communicate reality, it begins to resemble man; and when it is allocated the function of understanding linguistic messages and the capability of combining them according to rational rules, it progressively enters into resemblance with the human subject.

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