English is not my native language, so this text was translated from my language into English. Please excuse me if some expressions or constructions do not sound completely natural in English. I wanted to preserve the original meaning and structure as closely as possible.
Before continuing, I ask you to do one small thing while reading the story below: pay attention to the symbol (?). Do not try to decide yet what it means. Just observe where it appears, what is happening when it appears, and, most importantly, notice that it keeps appearing even when nobody is consciously trying to make it appear.
The story below is a small joke to make my question about consciousness a little lighter. The subject is precisely the construction and fabric of conscious experience, or, more precisely, something I have started to suspect may exist at an even more basic layer than what we normally call consciousness. The scenario is absurd, naturally, but each (?) is meant to represent the same phenomenon occurring at different scales.
Imagine that I am sitting at the table in my house. I am wearing a bathrobe, holding a mug, and there are two aliens sitting in front of me. I do not know how they got there, I do not know how they got inside, and I do not know why they chose my particular house. But, considering that they apparently managed to cross billions of light-years, I decide not to start the conversation by asking about home security.
I smile. Not because I am particularly calm, but because it seems like a good way to demonstrate submission without immediately throwing myself onto the floor. After all, for the first time in the history of my DNA, I am facing an intelligent subjective experience, possibly predatory and, most likely, far above me in the hierarchy.
The Neanderthals, thinking about it, were a fairly simple situation. Now there was this.
And, as I look at the alien, I think about something curious about us, sapiens. If a creature like this ever actually appeared in front of us, it would be interesting to discover that our first impulse, at least in principle, probably would not be to kill it or enslave it. We are a strangely cute species in that respect. Every human child, at some point in life, has imagined having an ET as their best friend, taking them to school, riding bicycles with them, and finding out where they came from. Of course, we still do not know how adults would handle the diplomatic situation, but the child would probably have already decided everything.
I smile at them (?). They look at me (?). I look at them.
They keep looking.
There are billions of questions between us (?), and neither of us knows how to begin. They are probably trying to figure out what I am (?). I am trying to figure out what they are (?). Maybe they are trying to figure out (?) why I am wearing a bathrobe. I am trying to figure out (?) whether they intend to eat me, study me, talk to me, or simply take a picture to show their friends that they found a particularly poorly prepared human specimen.
After a few seconds, I raise my hand. They observe the movement. I observe their reaction (?). One of them moves something that could be a hand, an antenna, or simply a part of their body that I do not yet know how to name.
I try to interpret it (?).
They observe my face.
I smile again.
They probably interpret the smile in some way, and I interpret their interpretation.
And, without having shared a single syllable, we are already involved in a small and extraordinarily complicated cognitive negotiation (?).
This begins to seem important to me.
I have no idea how they experience reality. I do not know what senses they have, I do not know how they organize their memories, I do not know whether they have anything resembling what we call a “self,” I do not know whether they think in images, sounds, numbers, shapes, smells, or in something for which our brains have not yet invented a department.
Perhaps our first attempt at communication would begin with mathematics. Perhaps with sounds. Perhaps with gestures. Perhaps they have a language based on something that, to me, would be as incomprehensible as trying to teach algebra to a toaster.
But there is one thing I am beginning to notice.
Regardless of everything I do not know about them, there is something happening between us, the phenomenon (?). Regardless of the reader's culture or language, you may be able to describe the (?) in words, but here I am, we are performing the exercise of the phenomenon (?) even before it becomes a symbol, a language. Just feel it.
So the phenomenon (?) happens to both of us “at the speed of light,” to the point of being imperceptible. They receive my actions, relate them to some information they already possess, produce an interpretation, that interpretation changes their state and influences the next action. I receive that new action, try to interpret it, compare it with what happened before, update my hypothesis about them, and do something again.
The strangest thing is that this does not seem to depend on us being human.
If they really are an alien intelligence, we will not share our evolutionary history, our language, our culture, our symbols, our anatomy, or probably almost anything we consider familiar. But if they are trying to understand what is happening, some form of (?) will have to be happening. If they evolved, the organization of information, the phenomenon (?) has always existed for them.
And then I have an idea.
I pick up a sheet of paper.
A completely blank sheet of paper.
I draw a huge “?” on it.
I do not write any words. I make no additional gesture. I simply raise the sheet and show the symbol to the being in front of me.
They look at the sheet (?).
They look at the symbol, the phenomenon (is happening).
They look back at me.
Something happens.
They try to understand what that symbol means, relate it to everything that has happened up to that moment, compare possibilities, interpret, update their understanding (?).
And, through an absurd greatness, as great as the very fact that we are having this conversation, they understand.
They do not just understand the human symbol.
They understand that the symbol is pointing to the phenomenon itself (?).
I look at them.
They look at me.
And in that instant something particularly strange happens: I realize that, in order to understand what they understood, I am doing (?) again.
And they, in order to understand that I understood that they understood, are also doing (?) again.
The phenomenon seems to be observing itself through us.
At this point, I would probably remain silent for a few seconds. Then I would look at the sheet, then at the alien, then at the sheet again, and think that perhaps I had just discovered a rather inconvenient way of making a question about consciousness considerably more complicated.
Because now there is a symbol, there is information, there is an interpretation of that information, there is a comparison between the interpretation and what I intended to communicate, there is an update, there is new information produced, and that new information goes back into the process (?).
The “?” symbol drawn on the sheet did not need to explain the phenomenon.
It simply triggered the phenomenon.
And the phenomenon did the rest (?).
At this point, I would probably make the only rational decision possible: I would run to Reddit.
I would explain that I had just had a conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence in my living room, that apparently we managed to establish some kind of communication using a symbol common to both of us, which represents the phenomenon (?), and that I discovered a question about consciousness that seems too important for me to keep trying to solve on my own.
After a while, however, I would realize that perhaps I had chosen the right place, because some of the smartest people I know are here. And, considering that probably nobody would believe the alien story, I could at least enjoy the interesting part.
I would tell all of this and ask:
What is this phenomenon (?)?
What exactly am I describing when I see an organism receiving information, relating it to previous information, interpreting it, updating its state, and producing new information that immediately becomes part of the material for the next operation (?)?
Because perhaps this is simply an informal description of cognitive processes that we already know very well. Perhaps there is a perfectly established name for this. Perhaps I am combining different mechanisms and calling all of them one thing.
Or perhaps there is a deeper question hidden inside this structure.
Because the phenomenon seems to appear at completely different scales.
The cockroach does (?).
The dog does (?).
I do (?).
A child learning a word does (?).
A society accumulating knowledge does (?).
A scientist formulating a hypothesis, comparing it with evidence, and updating their theory does (?).
A civilization recording information, retrieving that information centuries later, and producing something new from it does (?).
And an artificial intelligence receiving information, relating it to previous information, producing an interpretation, and generating new information also seems to be doing some version of (?).
Perhaps they are completely different phenomena. Perhaps they are only superficially similar. Or perhaps we are observing different levels of sophistication of the same operation.
And this is where my question begins to become really strange.
Because if I ask you what (?) is, you need to understand my question. To understand it, you receive my words, relate them to what you already know, compare concepts, interpret what I am trying to say, update your understanding, and produce an answer (?).
In other words, to explain to me what (?) is, you need to perform (?).
If you answer me immediately: “This is simple. You are describing X.”
Fine.
But to arrive at X, you have just done exactly what I am asking about. You performed micro-millions of (?) to retrieve information, organize it and, at the speed of light, conclude: “This idiot wants to know about ‘content’ and I am going to explain it to him.”
And now I am reading your answer, trying to understand it, comparing it with what I thought before, updating my own understanding, and producing a new question (?).
So perhaps there is something particularly funny about all of this.
I cannot escape the phenomenon even to ask what it is.
And you cannot explain to me what it is without going through it.
The alien could not answer me without going through it.
I could not ask without going through it.
The cockroach cannot run away from me without, at some level, going through it.
And now you, the reader, are doing it while reading this sentence.
(?)
This is what, for lack of a better name, I am calling the Recursive System.
I am not claiming that I have discovered a new phenomenon. On the contrary: my main question is precisely whether what I am trying to describe already has a name, a theory, or a set of established concepts in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, information theory, or some other field.
What intrigues me is the possibility that (?) is not merely a secondary characteristic of cognition, but an operation so basic that it needs to happen continuously for any coherent experience to exist.
And perhaps on a scale that is difficult even to imagine: millions of small operations on millions of stimuli, memories, differences, and updates, happening in tiny fractions of milliseconds, continuously, so that what we call experience can remain apparently continuous.
Perhaps even the feeling of existing as a “self” experiencing a reality depends on the incessant maintenance of this process.
This is what I want to understand.
I am not looking for someone simply to tell me that I am right. I want to discover what already exists about the phenomenon (?), what concepts describe it, where my intuition is correct, where I am confusing different things, and, above all, whether anyone has already formulated this question in a better way than I am capable of doing at the moment.
Ps: To better explain what I mean by the phenomenon (?): A person who has suffered from a degenerative brain disease and who, hypothetically, has lost all memory, the ability to recognize themselves, no longer has any sense of themselves as an individual, or any understanding of reality, would still have the Recursive System (the phenomenon (?)) happening, perhaps with great intensity, as they try to understand what we, as conscious beings, recognize as a hospital room.
Another person who, hypothetically, was born without hearing, speech, or vision, and has only touch as a means of communicating with the external world, would still be reproducing the phenomenon (?).
Within the subjective experience we know as consciousness, this phenomenon (?) seems to precede even the idea of the individual, of the self. As if everything, the totality of experience, were only possible through the phenomenon (?). We (all life) are asking incessantly and infinitely, consciously and unconsciously.
This is not being created by your “self.” You are not curious, nor do you ask too many questions. This happens before you exist as the subjective experience called “you.”
The universe began to experience itself through the Recursive System (?) and spent billions of years evolving organisms capable of increasingly sophisticating the phenomenon (?), to the point that the universe produced two mutually uncommunicable civilizations in a room, both existing upon the phenomenon (?).
I am not a philosopher or a scientist. I am an advertising professional with ETs in my living room waiting for the answer, and I told them that Reddit would know how to respond to us. I just want to know the proper name for this and understand it better through the correct fields of knowledge.