This is the coming together of three strands of thought:

• Consciousness. The so-called Hard Problem. I developed some ideas about this a while ago. I had no plans to develop them any further, so I just posted them here for want of doing anything else.
• Philosophy. My interest was in the nature of reality seen from the point of view of science. (although I would describe myself as a technologist rather than a scientist, I can claim to be in the club as my degree was in science and I have had scientific observations published in peer reviewed journals.)
• Technology. Prompted by recent developments in AI

The idea of the Mind Universe was the result of my reading about the claims of the postmodernists that there is no such thing as objective truth. This assertion was being used by climate denialists but I don’t think they use it much now.

I have been pondering the idea of consciousness for some time and concluded that an essential element was going through sufficient cycles of thinking for the outcome to be non-determinant, (think chaos theory). It seems to me that only by being non-determinant can free will be possible.

I imagined all this happening in the Mind Universe which evolves in the process. Ideas similar to these are suggested by various writers.

I can add to this is the observation that, when I am inventing something, I turn things over in my mind, look at the problem from different angles and in different ways, like making sketches or building models, or if I am lucky, discussing it with like minded colleagues. However this is just an anecdotal observation with little value in scientific terms.

Until very recently the idea of an artificial intelligence belonged to science fiction, but now the field of AI is advancing and the possibility of creating a human-like intelligence is becoming increasingly plausible, although there are serious concerns about whether this would be a good idea!

An important component of AI development is the neural net. This is a computer systems that looks for patterns in data. Understanding the way they work is challenging and what goes on while they work is obscure. However they do work and can can result in valuable systems like medical diagnosis that can outperform human practitioners. On the other hand they can be harmful when used for creating deep fakes. But they are not intelligent.

ChatGPT is just a very large neural net but also is not in any way intelligent.

In the report by Tim Lee in Ars Technica about developments at OpenAI he talks about “scratch space” and white boards which sound rather like my Mind Universe and “chain-of-thought” which sounds rather like cyclic thought processes.

Discussion

AI looks like a game-changing technology with serious implications for the better society relating to trust, can we trust the technology and the people that control it, and how it can subvert trust

Beyond this, there is just an interesting debate. I imagine a theory of consciousness in which I have a mind universe accessible only to me and which is where imagination happens. I imagine that other people have their own mind universes. If they do, it will be very different to mine and might imagine it in same way that I do.

But then this might all just be a figment of my imagination.

The philosophy of perception asks the same sort of question.

I have also included a short story that I wrote some time ago. It was writing this that started me thinking about this whole thing in greater depth.