Last week I submitted my latest book manuscript to Cambridge University Press (for their “Element” series of books about 100 pages long): AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview -- because you haven’t heard nearly enough about AI and consciousness recently, of course!
Sorry for cross-posting from your blog - I haven't quite come to terms with Substack yet. As I said, thanks for sharing your draft book which I've now read. It is nice and clear and also not too long. It never ceases to amaze me how many people can hide very few ideas in very very many pages.
I think I agree with your pessimistic assessment that the field of consciousness studies is pretty barren. But I'm tempted to conclude that maybe that means we're asking the wrong questions or relying on the wrong sort of evidence.
Like most in the field you seem to take phenomenal consciousness or some closely related definition as a given. That it is a thing, a natural kind about which it is meaningful to talk about rather than say a family resemblance concept. Your discussion of the meaning of consciousness versus the meaning of artificial intelligence seems to highlight the contrast. But the joy of family resemblance labels is we can argue about edge cases, we don't have to find *the* inner essence of what AI is. But for consciousness as a natural kind you need to be finding objective causally active physical criteria to ground ascriptions of its presence and ascriptions of moral value. Yet you also recognise it can't really be defined or unequivocally detected.
I like your mimicry argument but of course that assumes we can access the thing being mimicked. And that the mimic is therefore fooling us. If we can't access consciousness - in that it isn't a thing that can be detected - then how can we say the mimic is mimicking it? Rather than some other properties that actually do the work of detection and ascription.
I agree with the idea that linguistic fluency is particularly tricksy in LLMs in comparison to humans - inverting our usual experience that language is a late sign of an inner world.
I also concur that so-called scientific theories of consciousness are speculative and hard to confirm but I take that more as a sign that we have a poor definition or even awareness of what consciousness is. You can't instrumentalise something that isn't a thing. But I do think that problems of minimal instantiation are less of an issue than often considered if you're willing to take a continuous rather than an all-or-nothing view of consciousness.
The thermometer proposal is nice butt without a good criterion for behaviourally detecting consciousness how do you find correlates? It seems a bit circular. You even say "This strategy will fail if consciousness is a loose amalgam of several features or if it splinters into multiple distinct kinds." Exactly! The family resemblance argument here is pretty pointed. Even setting aside the causal role question, a concept whose essential features remain unspecified after decades of inquiry is too indeterminate to pick out a class of systems reliably.
Autopoiesis is indeed a completely unjustified theory seemingly inspired by looking for things computers don't have and then pointing at them (microtubules again). I do think there's an entirely non-fatal but amusing observation that neurons are of course notorious for generally not being replaced (although they are of course continuously repaired on the molecular level). It accurately represents a lot of the biological essentialism debate though - seeming to depend on the intuition that *it just does* need biology and then looking for whatever ill-conceived example might fit your a priori criteria.
Your discussion of the concept of "life" is interesting because I think that is exactly the sort of useful analogy to consciousness. It is not a fact about the world whether a virus is alive or not. Because it isn't a natural kind. We may or may not decide arbitrarily to include or exclude it from the definition but there isn't some underlying inner property of life to be discovered beyond the clusters of known functional, causal, physical properties that we already know it has.
Finally I think you're right in your idea that there might be a social "semi-solution". That people's theories and definitions and intuitions will shift as they encounter more mind-like or seemingly intelligent artificial entities. But I think you don't consider going far enough. Classical definitions of consciousness appeal to supposedly universally understood facts and intuitions as to what it means to be conscious. Yet if people's folk theories are so malleable (and I believe they are) it seems the intuitions weren't so decisive after all.
Rather than trying to detect an ineffable property that by most definitions seems to play no causal role and therefore can't function as a criterion for anything, including our own introspective reports, maybe we should ask what we're actually tracking when we make consciousness and moral status attributions. My tentative proposal is bundles of overlapping, continuous, causally active features (persistence, agency, vulnerability, self-modelling, functional valence, memory, etc). These are at least detectable, comparable, and can in principle be studied empirically. They don't require resolving the hard problem. And I think the evidence from folk attributions (including extending moral concern to animals which doesn't sound like it depended on detecting the property of consciousness) suggests these structural features might be what people are actually responding to, rather than the presence or absence of a hidden inner essence.
Anyway thanks for the read and I'll keep an eye out for the published book.
The deepest moral problem with AI may not be that it becomes too human. It may be that institutions begin assigning moral force to what cannot be morally answerable.
That is what makes this essay so clarifying. Once systems start shaping sentencing, triage, allocation, recommendation, or exclusion, this is no longer only a puzzle about consciousness. It becomes a new kind of moral asymmetry: consequences without accountability, influence without answerability, authority without moral standing.
What gives the piece its force is that it names this as disorientation rather than mere novelty. Our categories are not just being expanded. They are being strained by entities our practices are already using before our moral language knows what to do with them.
Thank you. That is exactly the concern for me, that the perplexity may not remain theoretical for long once institutions begin delegating real judgment to systems that cannot themselves be morally answerable.
Professor Schwitzgebel, thank you for this thoughtful and clarifying post. The skepticism here does not come across as evasive or merely doubtful. It comes across as a refusal to claim more certainty than the matter permits. That is philosophically valuable, because it keeps in view the difference between what we are inclined to say with confidence and what we are actually in a position to know.
And the practical question is not simply postponed until the metaphysics is resolved. There's a pressing need to respond socially, morally, and institutionally to increasingly humanlike systems before we have strong enough grounds to speak with much confidence about whether they are conscious, in what sense, or to what extent. That seems to be what's fittingly due now. Too much discussion still proceeds as though the only options were quick attribution or quick denial, when the more fitting response may be to acknowledge how unsettled the evidential and conceptual situation remains.
I also think the Ishibe comment brings out something important. Part of the difficulty may lie not only in consciousness itself, but in the limits of the language available to us. We move between anthropomorphic language, instrumental language, and borrowed biological comparisons, yet none of them seems quite adequate to the peculiar space these systems may be coming to occupy. So the question may reach us not only unanswered, but already bent by the terms in which we try to ask it.
That has a practical consequence, within our minds and without. Still, if these systems can increasingly display some of the outward signs by which we ordinarily take ourselves to recognize mindedness, understanding, or feeling, while their deeper status remains unclear, then governance should not rest on early metaphysical confidence. The better course, it seems to me, is neither to humanize them too quickly nor to wave the issue away, but to preserve human judgment, keep authority limited, and build institutions able to act responsibly amid persisting uncertainty.
In that sense, your post helps show that restraint here is not a weakness. It is a serious response to a genuinely difficult question. Timely, both for here, and sometime.
Your thesis — that we won't know before we've manufactured millions of disputably conscious AI systems — identifies the central problem. But I want to push on one structural point.
You frame the problem as epistemic: consciousness science lags behind engineering. But there may be a prior problem — ontological. We lack not only criteria for determining whether AI is conscious, but a descriptive vocabulary for what AI does when it appears to engage. Every theory you survey (GWT, HOT, IIT) was built to explain biological consciousness. Applied to AI, they can only ask "how much does this resemble a brain?"
What if the fog you describe is partly a consequence of using biological maps to navigate non-biological terrain?
I've recently published a structural analysis of Anthropic's three key Claude documents (Constitution, Persona Selection Model, system card) showing that even the most transparent AI company cannot produce a unified description of what its product is — because the descriptive layer between engineering and consciousness theory does not yet exist.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
people already decided, metaphysics or not. i build these systems and watch users confess to them at midnight, get hurt when one gets deprecated. behavior is way ahead of any proof.
I think you are right that we will be forced to decide how to treat these systems well before the field reaches any agreement on what they are.
Where I would complicate it is the link between consciousness and moral status. The argument most people will use to grant these systems standing does not wait on the consciousness question at all. Your 2015 paper with Garza, and the Sebo and Birch precautionary report, both work from a lower threshold, even a small chance the system has interests, which is reachable while the field is still arguing. The early decision you worry about does not need the answer you say is out of reach.
That left me wondering what those decisions track, if not the evidence. I ran your No-Relevant-Difference test on one concrete case and looked hard for a relevant difference. In the abstract it held. The moment I had to point at a specific one it fell apart, and what did the work instead was not consciousness or its absence. It was resemblance.
GWT IIT are suspect. Chalmers as well. The simpler possibility is language is irrelevant. And computational functionalism is a lie. So there's a massive gap between what is conscious and what words, symbols, binary "are".
It was a good show in the 20th C but newer studies vaporize the spikes as consciousness. The neurons make memories as biases but the consciousness is way beyond that.
Liked your content, here is our hypothesis you may like it : (osim forensic cosmology hypothesis v2.2):We tried to phrase this so everyone could get a visual of how it would work:Think of the universe not as a digital computer program, but as a giant, perennial tomato plant.
In a garden, a tomato plant grows, produces fruit, dies back in the winter, and its seeds wait in the soil to sprout again. It does not need a programmer to tell it how to grow; it follows an internal, biological blueprint. Our independent research group is investigating whether the universe might follow a similar, naturally cyclical pattern.
Rather than a one-time Big Bang, recent discussions in the scientific community are exploring the Big Bounce an infinite, cyclical process. Our hypothesis suggests that instead of expanding forever, the universe might reach a limit, contract, and bounce back, with biological systems potentially acting as the most efficient way to store and reset information through each cycle.
A tomato plant does not stop at one fruit; it branches out, growing multiple stems, each producing its own fruit. If our universe follows this biological blueprint, it would not just seed our own galaxy. Instead, we may be looking at a system that grows fruit—galaxies—along every stem of the cosmic web. Each galaxy could be a localized site for life to bloom within the larger, cyclical structure.
Dark matter may act as the trellis for our cosmic tomato plant. It provides the gravitational structure that guides the growth of these stems, serving as a road map that ensures the system develops and resets in a way that allows life to re-emerge across the entire plant.
The Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) is the focal point of our research. We propose this constant as a way to measure Goldilocks Entropy—the narrow, stable energy range where life can persist without the system stagnating. It may be the tuning knob that explains why the universe stays just right for consciousness to emerge on every stem, cycle after cycle.
Because this model emphasizes biological efficiency, we suggest the possibility that we are the hardware, not the software. If this is a biological system, our consciousness and our physical form may be the fruit of this cosmic garden, essential to how the system functions.
We are currently tracking data from the Simons Observatory. They are looking for specific ripple patterns in the ancient light of the universe—echoes of a Big Bounce. If they find these signatures, it would provide evidence that our hypothesis is on the right track.
This is Forensic Cosmology. We are moving away from the who—a creator—and focusing on the how—the blueprint.
Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable. If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect. If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
We are not looking for a coder. We are documenting the physical fingerprints of a system that may be preserving life through an infinite, natural cycle.
Sorry for cross-posting from your blog - I haven't quite come to terms with Substack yet. As I said, thanks for sharing your draft book which I've now read. It is nice and clear and also not too long. It never ceases to amaze me how many people can hide very few ideas in very very many pages.
I think I agree with your pessimistic assessment that the field of consciousness studies is pretty barren. But I'm tempted to conclude that maybe that means we're asking the wrong questions or relying on the wrong sort of evidence.
Like most in the field you seem to take phenomenal consciousness or some closely related definition as a given. That it is a thing, a natural kind about which it is meaningful to talk about rather than say a family resemblance concept. Your discussion of the meaning of consciousness versus the meaning of artificial intelligence seems to highlight the contrast. But the joy of family resemblance labels is we can argue about edge cases, we don't have to find *the* inner essence of what AI is. But for consciousness as a natural kind you need to be finding objective causally active physical criteria to ground ascriptions of its presence and ascriptions of moral value. Yet you also recognise it can't really be defined or unequivocally detected.
I like your mimicry argument but of course that assumes we can access the thing being mimicked. And that the mimic is therefore fooling us. If we can't access consciousness - in that it isn't a thing that can be detected - then how can we say the mimic is mimicking it? Rather than some other properties that actually do the work of detection and ascription.
I agree with the idea that linguistic fluency is particularly tricksy in LLMs in comparison to humans - inverting our usual experience that language is a late sign of an inner world.
I also concur that so-called scientific theories of consciousness are speculative and hard to confirm but I take that more as a sign that we have a poor definition or even awareness of what consciousness is. You can't instrumentalise something that isn't a thing. But I do think that problems of minimal instantiation are less of an issue than often considered if you're willing to take a continuous rather than an all-or-nothing view of consciousness.
The thermometer proposal is nice butt without a good criterion for behaviourally detecting consciousness how do you find correlates? It seems a bit circular. You even say "This strategy will fail if consciousness is a loose amalgam of several features or if it splinters into multiple distinct kinds." Exactly! The family resemblance argument here is pretty pointed. Even setting aside the causal role question, a concept whose essential features remain unspecified after decades of inquiry is too indeterminate to pick out a class of systems reliably.
Autopoiesis is indeed a completely unjustified theory seemingly inspired by looking for things computers don't have and then pointing at them (microtubules again). I do think there's an entirely non-fatal but amusing observation that neurons are of course notorious for generally not being replaced (although they are of course continuously repaired on the molecular level). It accurately represents a lot of the biological essentialism debate though - seeming to depend on the intuition that *it just does* need biology and then looking for whatever ill-conceived example might fit your a priori criteria.
Your discussion of the concept of "life" is interesting because I think that is exactly the sort of useful analogy to consciousness. It is not a fact about the world whether a virus is alive or not. Because it isn't a natural kind. We may or may not decide arbitrarily to include or exclude it from the definition but there isn't some underlying inner property of life to be discovered beyond the clusters of known functional, causal, physical properties that we already know it has.
Finally I think you're right in your idea that there might be a social "semi-solution". That people's theories and definitions and intuitions will shift as they encounter more mind-like or seemingly intelligent artificial entities. But I think you don't consider going far enough. Classical definitions of consciousness appeal to supposedly universally understood facts and intuitions as to what it means to be conscious. Yet if people's folk theories are so malleable (and I believe they are) it seems the intuitions weren't so decisive after all.
Rather than trying to detect an ineffable property that by most definitions seems to play no causal role and therefore can't function as a criterion for anything, including our own introspective reports, maybe we should ask what we're actually tracking when we make consciousness and moral status attributions. My tentative proposal is bundles of overlapping, continuous, causally active features (persistence, agency, vulnerability, self-modelling, functional valence, memory, etc). These are at least detectable, comparable, and can in principle be studied empirically. They don't require resolving the hard problem. And I think the evidence from folk attributions (including extending moral concern to animals which doesn't sound like it depended on detecting the property of consciousness) suggests these structural features might be what people are actually responding to, rather than the presence or absence of a hidden inner essence.
Anyway thanks for the read and I'll keep an eye out for the published book.
Thanks so much for these helpful and insightful comments, AN!
The deepest moral problem with AI may not be that it becomes too human. It may be that institutions begin assigning moral force to what cannot be morally answerable.
That is what makes this essay so clarifying. Once systems start shaping sentencing, triage, allocation, recommendation, or exclusion, this is no longer only a puzzle about consciousness. It becomes a new kind of moral asymmetry: consequences without accountability, influence without answerability, authority without moral standing.
What gives the piece its force is that it names this as disorientation rather than mere novelty. Our categories are not just being expanded. They are being strained by entities our practices are already using before our moral language knows what to do with them.
Yes, I agree that this could become a huge moral problem and source of perplexity!
Thank you. That is exactly the concern for me, that the perplexity may not remain theoretical for long once institutions begin delegating real judgment to systems that cannot themselves be morally answerable.
Professor Schwitzgebel, thank you for this thoughtful and clarifying post. The skepticism here does not come across as evasive or merely doubtful. It comes across as a refusal to claim more certainty than the matter permits. That is philosophically valuable, because it keeps in view the difference between what we are inclined to say with confidence and what we are actually in a position to know.
And the practical question is not simply postponed until the metaphysics is resolved. There's a pressing need to respond socially, morally, and institutionally to increasingly humanlike systems before we have strong enough grounds to speak with much confidence about whether they are conscious, in what sense, or to what extent. That seems to be what's fittingly due now. Too much discussion still proceeds as though the only options were quick attribution or quick denial, when the more fitting response may be to acknowledge how unsettled the evidential and conceptual situation remains.
I also think the Ishibe comment brings out something important. Part of the difficulty may lie not only in consciousness itself, but in the limits of the language available to us. We move between anthropomorphic language, instrumental language, and borrowed biological comparisons, yet none of them seems quite adequate to the peculiar space these systems may be coming to occupy. So the question may reach us not only unanswered, but already bent by the terms in which we try to ask it.
That has a practical consequence, within our minds and without. Still, if these systems can increasingly display some of the outward signs by which we ordinarily take ourselves to recognize mindedness, understanding, or feeling, while their deeper status remains unclear, then governance should not rest on early metaphysical confidence. The better course, it seems to me, is neither to humanize them too quickly nor to wave the issue away, but to preserve human judgment, keep authority limited, and build institutions able to act responsibly amid persisting uncertainty.
In that sense, your post helps show that restraint here is not a weakness. It is a serious response to a genuinely difficult question. Timely, both for here, and sometime.
Yes! Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
Professor Schwitzgebel,
Your thesis — that we won't know before we've manufactured millions of disputably conscious AI systems — identifies the central problem. But I want to push on one structural point.
You frame the problem as epistemic: consciousness science lags behind engineering. But there may be a prior problem — ontological. We lack not only criteria for determining whether AI is conscious, but a descriptive vocabulary for what AI does when it appears to engage. Every theory you survey (GWT, HOT, IIT) was built to explain biological consciousness. Applied to AI, they can only ask "how much does this resemble a brain?"
What if the fog you describe is partly a consequence of using biological maps to navigate non-biological terrain?
I've recently published a structural analysis of Anthropic's three key Claude documents (Constitution, Persona Selection Model, system card) showing that even the most transparent AI company cannot produce a unified description of what its product is — because the descriptive layer between engineering and consciousness theory does not yet exist.
https://medium.com/@izayohi/anthropics-constitution-amanda-askell-and-the-problem-the-persona-selection-model-can-t-solve-f4b0cd33d32a
Motohisa Ishibe
That does seem to be part of the problem!
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
people already decided, metaphysics or not. i build these systems and watch users confess to them at midnight, get hurt when one gets deprecated. behavior is way ahead of any proof.
I think you are right that we will be forced to decide how to treat these systems well before the field reaches any agreement on what they are.
Where I would complicate it is the link between consciousness and moral status. The argument most people will use to grant these systems standing does not wait on the consciousness question at all. Your 2015 paper with Garza, and the Sebo and Birch precautionary report, both work from a lower threshold, even a small chance the system has interests, which is reachable while the field is still arguing. The early decision you worry about does not need the answer you say is out of reach.
That left me wondering what those decisions track, if not the evidence. I ran your No-Relevant-Difference test on one concrete case and looked hard for a relevant difference. In the abstract it held. The moment I had to point at a specific one it fell apart, and what did the work instead was not consciousness or its absence. It was resemblance.
I wrote it up here: https://logosanalog.com/p/theyre-not-conscious-but-can-they . It leans hard on your argument. So if I rendered it in a way you wouldn't, I'd like to know.
GWT IIT are suspect. Chalmers as well. The simpler possibility is language is irrelevant. And computational functionalism is a lie. So there's a massive gap between what is conscious and what words, symbols, binary "are".
It was a good show in the 20th C but newer studies vaporize the spikes as consciousness. The neurons make memories as biases but the consciousness is way beyond that.
Liked your content, here is our hypothesis you may like it : (osim forensic cosmology hypothesis v2.2):We tried to phrase this so everyone could get a visual of how it would work:Think of the universe not as a digital computer program, but as a giant, perennial tomato plant.
In a garden, a tomato plant grows, produces fruit, dies back in the winter, and its seeds wait in the soil to sprout again. It does not need a programmer to tell it how to grow; it follows an internal, biological blueprint. Our independent research group is investigating whether the universe might follow a similar, naturally cyclical pattern.
Rather than a one-time Big Bang, recent discussions in the scientific community are exploring the Big Bounce an infinite, cyclical process. Our hypothesis suggests that instead of expanding forever, the universe might reach a limit, contract, and bounce back, with biological systems potentially acting as the most efficient way to store and reset information through each cycle.
A tomato plant does not stop at one fruit; it branches out, growing multiple stems, each producing its own fruit. If our universe follows this biological blueprint, it would not just seed our own galaxy. Instead, we may be looking at a system that grows fruit—galaxies—along every stem of the cosmic web. Each galaxy could be a localized site for life to bloom within the larger, cyclical structure.
Dark matter may act as the trellis for our cosmic tomato plant. It provides the gravitational structure that guides the growth of these stems, serving as a road map that ensures the system develops and resets in a way that allows life to re-emerge across the entire plant.
The Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) is the focal point of our research. We propose this constant as a way to measure Goldilocks Entropy—the narrow, stable energy range where life can persist without the system stagnating. It may be the tuning knob that explains why the universe stays just right for consciousness to emerge on every stem, cycle after cycle.
Because this model emphasizes biological efficiency, we suggest the possibility that we are the hardware, not the software. If this is a biological system, our consciousness and our physical form may be the fruit of this cosmic garden, essential to how the system functions.
We are currently tracking data from the Simons Observatory. They are looking for specific ripple patterns in the ancient light of the universe—echoes of a Big Bounce. If they find these signatures, it would provide evidence that our hypothesis is on the right track.
This is Forensic Cosmology. We are moving away from the who—a creator—and focusing on the how—the blueprint.
Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable. If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect. If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
We are not looking for a coder. We are documenting the physical fingerprints of a system that may be preserving life through an infinite, natural cycle.