Software is kind of magic, if you think about it. It’s a causal pattern written in a language that is not the same language that we use to describe what happens in the transistors of your computer. Software does not break physics, but it’s able to control physics. Once you establish software, it’s a causal pattern that is determining what happens in reality to some point.
My mind very much has the properties of what people call a spirit. It’s agentic, it’s capable of experience, right? And it’s a software that runs on the brain. My brain is probably not agentic and capable of experience. It’s my mind—that is, it’s me. It’s this representational pattern existing on it.
The organism is not a physical thing. It’s not an object like an electron or something. It’s something that is a function that describes the organization between the cells. What you’re actually looking at when you look at an organism is a few trillion cells that behave as if they were one thing. And this behavior as if they’re one thing, this coherent behavior, is the result of a causal communication pattern between these cells—and this is a software.
At which point does the spirit of an organism start? You can ask yourself: at which point does the spirit of a society start? And a society is ultimately composed of human individuals that talk to each other, and have beliefs about each other, and establish norms about how to interact in the future, and expectations, and so on. And it’s a gradual process, but there are some principles that turn a group of people into a society. For instance governance, where you basically establish institutional structures that make sure that the society gets a degree of stability and regulation. And this government is itself software, right? It’s a set of rules that society gives itself.
The concepts that you’re talking about are concepts in some kind of representational language in our minds. So they’re not the physics outside of us, because we cannot experience the world outside of us directly, or get a grasp on it directly. All we get is patterns that your perceptual system is extracting from reality through the learning in your mind, and the generalization in your mind. And some of these patterns are about language that other people speak, and this allows us to share these concepts that we have, and to converge on shared conceptualizations of reality. But this makes us a collective mind, to some degree, where humanity is a collective modeling system of reality. But the objects that we’re talking about are not objectively there, they are there from the perspective of this modeling observer.