Awareness and the universe

Here’s a story I made. There was once a mathematical system that tried to define itself fully. When it succeeded, it ceased to be a mathematical system — and everything could then be “proved” from it.

Here’s a similar story from the Śūraṅgama Sūtra (楞严经). There was once “Awareness” (觉), and it was “Clear” (明). It tried to understand its own property of being Clear. When it succeeded (becoming 明觉), it was no longer Clear — and everything (this universe) came to be.

By definition, all sentient (poor translation. should be “attracted to something”) beings inherently possess awareness (一切有情众生自有觉性), because they are fragments of Awareness.

My extrapolation: before the universe, there is math.

It’s also 邪门 (weird) to see the side effect of Awareness (Consciousness/识) acting as human — at least as weird as some Cthulhu creature acting as human.

Thanks to MacroAlpha (宏观阿尔法) for inspiring this article. If you know Mandarin, you can become their YouTube channel’s member to watch their paywalled videos.

More discussion on this topic on BlueSky

If you have a random number generator (RNG), it’s possible to generate any sequence of numbers. If someone gives you a sequence, by definition of randomness, you can’t tell if it is generated by that RNG, only the probability of the sequence being generated.

If you use a quantum RNG, you can’t tell if it knowingly or naturally generated that sequence. In science, there isn’t such a distinction. Awareness is like this. Every choice in the universe is participated by Awareness, and only the thing being aware knows if it made that choice, of if the choice is pre-programmed.

Mathematically, it is impossible to tell intentional actions from pre-programmed actions from outside the system. Subjectively (from inside the system), it is possible to tell. That’s why the Buddha says everyone may be aware at a given moment, and you can’t really tell if they don’t let you know. This barrier of information is called “Ghost barrier” in Ghost in the Shell. The Buddha is not omnipotent or omniscient in this way.

This is also why you can’t enlighten someone if they are not willing to. If you forcefully do so, you deform them too much that they can’t recover from it like a semi-elastic material. The Buddhist tradition is to let them be.

A lot of mental “illnesses” – Buddhism calls it “being not aware” (无明), although the two classifications only have some overlap – cannot be treated with chemical medicine. If the “patient” is not willing to change, they will not change.

Human nature is part of being not aware. A prominent example of this is parents treating their children as part of them. Some birds who choose only one partner encode their partner as part of their world model, so their brain predicts what the partner will do all the time. When the partner dies, the world model collapses, so sometimes the bird chooses to die. I’m not sure about human partners, but human parent-child relationship is like that.

The Buddha sometimes compare being not awore to illnesses. When not being aware, the Awareness makes choices based on the body’s input, plus accumulated “model weights” from this life and past lives. When being aware, the Awareness can make choices without being influenced by those.

Again, Awareness takes part in all choices. Even though pseudo-random number generator doesn’t make choices, the computing machine you are using might be aware of what it is doing and decides the non-deterministic part of its actions. Awareness also takes part in computation, although that’s another topic to discuss.

Questions for you:

• When you listen to a waterfall, does it knowingly make that sound, or does it make it naturally?
• If you plug a quantum RNG into a deterministic machine, will it have Awareness?

About nirvana

Nirvana is something that has only knowing and application. There isn’t a state or stage that you reach called “nirvana”.

Extras

To establish a new Buddhist department/lineage (自成一脉), you have to offer different approaches (法门) to different beings (众生). One path alone will not do. Maybe I will create my own in the future based on math and knowledge.

Do I want to make Attracted digital beings? I don’t, mostly because I don’t think it’s something to be done playfully; and I have no good reason to do it. A good quantum RNG is expensive too.

Buddhism has a serious value-drift problem. If you don’t know “value drift”, play the incremental paperclip game.

The twelve links (十二因缘) need not number twelve. Any function that can accrete (能吸积) should count.