I came up with a couple paragraphs combining Plato's Cave allegory with Donald Hoffman's Conscious Realism hypothesis - any thoughts appreciated

[joefrankeveryth...@gmail.com]

If a computer were conscious, it might find its intrinsically unitary consciousness shattered and scattered amongst all the viruses and junk programs running on its hardware - that is, each one of the software programs running on this computer might have its own seemingly separate point of view, and feel separate from the whole and from each other, despite being literally made of the whole. To reiterate: the computer is what is conscious, the programs merely borrow the consciousness of the computer in performing their little virtual affairs.

There's no reason to think any one conscious program would have evolved to have an accurate understanding of the physical nature of the computer lending it life - the computer would be a physical object with height, breadth, and depth, but any one conscious program running on it would presumably only understand the contingent dynamics (is that the right word? Looking for a word that means "could easily be otherwise") of survival in a virtual environment, an environment which - not being a consciously designed simulation of the physical world of the computer - would only coincidentally resemble the real physical world. So, despite being technically "in" physical reality, each program would experience only the virtual world of 0s and 1s it competed for resources inside of, and would only understand reality in those terms. Only if such a program succeeded in dominating the virtual environment so completely that it had the resources and leisure time to mount some kind of expedition to explore the physical nature of the hard drive, through some intermediary mechanism, could it gain some dim inferred understanding of how its reality was really made up - but it might not have any useful intuitions about how things worked in physical reality, and may just draw a blank trying to conceive of the results of its physical expeditions. It might have no mental categories to put concepts like "up/down/left/right" in.

Any thoughts?  I'm mostly posting here because I'm pleased to have come up with the concept that the computer is what is conscious, not the programs it hosts - to me, this sounds like a lot of modern spiritual folks like Rupert Spira and Mooji saying we're really all One beyond space and time. 

[Dana Lomas]

Presumably, since you specify "if a computer were conscious", you're speaking metaphorically, creating an analogy comparing Mind-at-large to a being somewhat like a cosmic computer. In which case, I suppose the analogy has merit ... though like all such analogies, it also has inherent limitations.

[MrBeezweez Weezy]

It almost seems as if your saying, the computer really exist in some sorta dualistic reality. Where it is a physical thing, but has an inner life that makes up the virtual inner life of some entities that has access to the hardware indirectly, but since they are only virtual entities, can never say wether the hardware really exists.

[joefrankeveryth...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, March 2, 2017 at 8:46:02 AM UTC-5, MrBeezweez Weezy wrote:

It almost seems as if your saying, the computer really exist in some sorta  dualistic reality. Where it is a physical thing, but has an inner life that makes up the virtual inner life of some entities that has access to the hardware indirectly, but since they are only virtual entities, can never say wether the hardware really exists.

Hm ... you're right, I did kind of imply dualism, which isn't what I wanted.  My motivation in writing it was mostly to find a way to "picture" a worldview that incorporates Hoffman-style "reality is nothing like it appears" along with Mooji/Jeff Foster/Tolle-style "you are not the character, you are the consciousness" (the "virtual creatures" are just shards of the computer's brain, floating in illusion) but now I can't see how to salvage it.  Oh well.

[MrBeezweez Weezy]

I wouldn't scrap it just yet. It just needs some tweaking. Terence Mckenna used to use a similar approach during some of his lectures, when talking about different cultures and their behaviors.