Let’s say you are talking about the cup with water with an AI robot.
Human： “what do you think happens if I let this cup fall down?”
AI: “Of course the water is spilled all over”

What’s necessary to hold such conversation?

First, it is necessary to identify “a cup” and “water”.
Then such facts are necessary to understand:
・a cup is a container that holds liquid
・water is liquid and it flows down
・when a cup falls down, its content is spilled out

Let’s say an AI robot is capturing the scenery in front of it with a CCD camera.
Can AI consciousness make a conversation with this degree of knowledge?

First, it is necessary to identify “a cup” or “water”.  
However, data captured by CCD camera is only accumulation of the three colors, RGB dots.

So, is our human consciousness finding out and identifying a cup or water from the accumulation of RGB pixels?
I don’t think so.
When you see the cup in front of you, you already identify it as a cup.

Hence, consciousness only perceives what is projected as the object perceivable by consciousness.
Now “object” here refers to the post “What Does It Mean? : To Identify A Three-Dimensional Space”, in short, it is accumulated data of one subject categorized by shape, color and size.
How can we make this realized?
Now let’s do a very simple thought-experiment.

Let’s imagine you wearing a VR (virtual reality) goggle.

 

 

But, the video projected inside the VR goggle is the same one you are seeing now.
Hence you can see the same scene with or without the goggle.
As you turn your neck, the scenery around you changes – so you don’t feel unnatural watching it.

It feels as though it is projecting the very video of the camera on the goggle inside, it isn’t exactly.
In actuality, it analyzes the video on the spot and converts it into a very similar ３DCG.
The CG looks very much the same, so you wouldn’t notice the difference.

Now from this point on, I’m going to explain consciousness.
Let’s say you wearing a VR goggle is consciousness.

What we see is all the object of CG.
We perceive per object, and each object has relevant data associated with.

In other words, by perceiving the object of cup, we perceive that it is a container to contain liquid.
By perceiving water, we perceive that it is liquid hence it flows.

Like this, by converting the real world into ３DCG, we can construct the world we perceive every day.

This is the same world that humans perceive.
Hence we can share the same data (such as a cup is a container) as we see the same thing.
It means we have the same protocol as each other.
Hence, we can construct the ecosystem of mind and communicate with each other with other people naturally.
As I have explained about the “ecosystem of mind” in the post “The Turing Test and the System of Mind”, in short, it is a group of those with the same system of mind who communicate each other.

What constructs virtual worlds is unconsciousness.
Consciousness can only perceive virtual worlds made by unconsciousness.
Instead, as it is a virtual world, it can associate relevant data based on knowledge and experience with constructed 3D objects.

Then, what is consciousness？
Consciousness is a program that maneuvers the virtual world.

It maneuvers the virtual world and finds out designated cognitive patterns.
To find out the cognitive pattern that tells you that if a glass of water falls down, water is spilled.
As cognitive patterns are commonly shared with others, both parties can understand the phenomenon.

If a phenomenon “if a glass of water falls down, your back becomes itchy” existed, it would not make sense unless it had been commonly shared.
What shares cognitive patterns is the ecosystem of mind.

To know that if a glass of water falls down and the desk is wet, this is a cognitive pattern.
It is also a cognitive pattern to know that by spilling the desk, it will trouble people at the restaurant.
By having cognitive patterns one after the other to the point in which you will trouble people at the restaurant, one of the social emotional patterns, you will be able to judge that it should not be done.

This is consciousness.
Consciousness maneuvers objects in different ways to figure out ways to extract some emotional pattern into being.
It determines what action to take based on the extracted emotional pattern.
This is the role of consciousness in the ecosystem of mind.

 

Now, this becomes very crucial here.
I personally don’t think this is just about installing consciousness into AI.
I think human consciousness is structured like this too.
This is what I call the hypothesis of consciousness in a virtual world.

What I mean by this is the hypothesis that, the world we are seeing now might be a virtual world constructed by our unconsciousness.
We are not actually seeing or feeling the world we think we are, but it is just a virtual world constructed by unconsciousness.

We perceive the perfectly emulated world we see with our eyes.
Not just our sense of seeing, sense of sound, smell and touch – everything comes from a virtual reality.
The feeling you feel and the sound you hear when you slap the desk are the senses coming from slapping a virtual desk.

The world you think is the reality is actually a virtual world created by unconsciousness.
You are not seeing the desk and chairs in front of your eyes in the reality; you are seeing a virtual desk and chairs constructed by unconsciousness.
If you may, we human beings have never in our lives perceived the real world directly – we have been living in virtual worlds.

As if in the world of the movie “The Matrix”.
Neo, the protagonist, takes a red pill to find out the truth.
What he has been presented is the human race put into sleep and being incubated.

 

A cable inserted right from the back of the head into the brain, their consciousness was being projected virtual reality.
Everyday what they thought they were going through normal life, was in fact, a dream made of virtual reality displayed by computer. Not the real world.

 

 

This is not just a story inside a science fiction movie but the truth.
We human beings have never experienced such thing as a real world, and that all we have been presented with is a world in a virtual reality.

What’s different from the movie The Matrix is that the content inside a virtual reality is a premise emulation of the reality.
But it is not doubt that this isn’t the real world.
The world you are seeing right at this moment is a virtual world.

Even then, you would say:
“But still this world, this desk is a reality itself”
and slap on the desk.

Yet what your consciousness perceives are the sound that your hand in a virtual reality made by slapping the desk in a virtual reality and the pain your hand in a virtual reality felt.
You have never experienced a real world in your life – and how are you able to distinguish it from a virtual world？