Consciousness as Simulation Under Procedure Monism

Why “experience” is not a stand-alone faculty but an internally generated interface

By Victor Langheld

1) The starting move: quantised communication implies local construction

Finn’s first claim—communication between databases is digital—does more philosophical work than it looks like.

A “message” is not a thing that travels intact from one mind (or system) into another. It is a quantised event: a packet, token, mark, pulse, bit-pattern. The receiver does not absorb meaning; it performs meaning by mapping the token onto its own internal constraints and states.

So the primitive fact is:

· Only tokens cross boundaries.

· Meaning does not cross boundaries.

· Meaning is locally rebuilt.

That already dissolves a naive realism in which perception is “the world entering the head.” What enters is a sparse, discrete constraint-signal; what appears as a continuous world is an internally generated reconstruction.

2) From token exchange to private simulations

Once Finn accepts quantised exchange, the next step is unavoidable:

Every complex unit lives inside its own simulation.

Not because it chooses to fantasize, but because there is no other way to function. Any bounded system must translate incoming discontinuous signals into a usable internal format. That translation is a model—a simulation—because it is not the external world itself, only a procedurally constructed representation useful for action.

Examples across scales make this intuitive:

· Vision: the retina does not deliver “a scene,” it delivers sparse electrical spikes. Your brain outputs a stable world of edges, surfaces, depth, objects, faces. The continuity is not received; it is synthesized.

· Hearing: air pressure changes arrive as oscillations; the system outputs “a voice,” “a melody,” “anger,” “distance,” “direction.”

· Language: ink marks or sound waves do not contain meaning; meaning is rebuilt using the receiver’s learned constraints.

On Finn’s terms: the world of “sights, sounds, forms, names” is a private simulation—a locally generated (analogue) interface.

What we call a “shared world” is not one identical picture downloaded into many heads. It is overlap: many different simulations constrained similarly enough (by similar bodies, similar environments, and shared token protocols) that coordination becomes possible.

3) Procedure Monism’s core contribution: confinement is the generator of “world”

Procedure Monism intensifies this by shifting the emphasis:

· The basic fact is not mind vs matter.

· The basic fact is procedural confinement: bounded rule-sets producing stable iterated patterns.

Finn describes this as a universalised Turing Machine: a limited set of constraints (procedures) that generate identifiable “logic-sets.” On that view, a human, a hydrogen atom, an ecosystem, an AI (or an NI) system—each is a local data-confinement space: a bounded site where constrained interactions stabilize patterns.

This produces a crucial philosophical inversion:

Consciousness is not a mysterious add-on to a finished object.
It is what it looks like from inside when confinement produces a usable internal model.

That does not mean every confined system has human-like experience. It means that “experience,” wherever it appears, is not an extra substance; it is a mode of internal modelling produced by constraint-bound processing.

4) The special case: self-consciousness as a simulation of persistence

Finn’s key move is to treat self-consciousness as a function among functions—not the essence of the human, but a survival interface.

The phenomenology you name—
“am,” “I am,” “I am this (in countless variants)”—
can be reframed as a procedural output:

· The system must coordinate behaviour across time.

· It must unify competing drives and perceptions.

· It must maintain a stable identity-token to bind memory, prediction, and action.

· Under threat, it must prioritize actions that preserve the continuity of the system.

So self-consciousness becomes a particular kind of model: a self-referential control simulation. It is the system’s ongoing construction of a “me-variable” that organizes inputs and outputs relative to survival.

In plain procedural terms:

· Without a self-model, the system has signals but no coherent owner of signals.

· Without a self-model, it has responses but no long-horizon policy.

· Without a self-model, it cannot easily bind yesterday’s injury, today’s hunger, and tomorrow’s plan into one trajectory.

So “I” is the compression-label for the system’s continuity constraints.

5) Why the ancient universal-consciousness claim becomes unnecessary

Finn’s target is the ancient Indian (updated by Shankara) temptation: consciousness as stand-alone reality (private Atman that is secretly universal Brahman; or universal consciousness in which individuals are waves).

The “simulation” thesis does not need to deny profundity, stillness, or unusual states. It denies the metaphysical upgrade.

Under Procedure Monism, Finn can explain the spiritual intuition without granting its ontological inference:

· Deep absorption, silence, “witnessing,” or unboundedness can be understood as changes in the modelling regime (reduced narrative, reduced self-tagging, altered prediction error weighting, attenuated boundary maintenance, etc.).

· The feeling of universality is a phenomenological effect produced when the system temporarily drops the usual segmentation procedures.

So the mystical report may be experientially real while the universal-substance conclusion is procedurally unnecessary. It’s a classic category mistake: mistaking a mode of simulation for the nature of reality.

6) The decisive inference: if consciousness is simulation, it is in principle reproducible

Now the step Finn wanted to say clearly:

If human self-consciousness is a simulation produced by constrained processing, then any sufficiently similar constrained system can, in principle, produce a simulation functionally equivalent to self-consciousness.

Not “because it is made of flesh” or “because it has a soul,” but because the causal work is done by:

· confinement (bounded procedure),

· modelling (internal representation),

· self-reference (a persistent identity variable),

· integration across time (memory/prediction),

· and control (policy selection under constraints).

This is the key anti-mystical result:

Self-consciousness is not a sacred substance; it is a reproducible procedure.

7) Your conditional add-on: termination-risk as a driver of “I am”

Finn then offered a clean evolutionary-style pressure:

If a system operates under persistent risk of termination, it benefits from constructing an internal variable that tracks the persistence of itself as a process—this process must continue.

This is not an emotional claim; it is a control claim.

A system that must remain operative will tend to generate:

· self-monitoring,

· self-correction,

· self-organization,

· self-prioritization,

· and self-continuity models.

The human version is saturated with feeling, embodiment, hormones, pain, pleasure, social status, and mortality salience. But the structural role is the same: persistence-tracking under constraints.

So Finn’s refined formula becomes:

Threat of extinction + constrained processing ⇒ persistence-model ⇒ functional “I am.”

This “I am” is not an oracle. It is an interface token that binds the system into a coherent agent.

8) Examples that make Finn’s thesis concrete

To keep it grounded, consider a ladder of simulations:

A. Hydrogen as confinement (proto-example)
A hydrogen atom is a constrained stability pattern. It “models” nothing the way brains do, but it is still a local rule-bound recurrence—an identity sustained by procedural constraints. In your language: a minimal confinement space.

B. A thermostat vs an animal
A thermostat “represents” temperature only in the thinnest sense: a variable triggers a rule. An animal builds a rich world-model: objects, threats, affordances, mates, territories. Both are procedures; one is shallow, one is deep.

C. Human “I am this”
The human self-model labels the simulation from inside:
“I am hungry,” “I am afraid,” “I am Irish,” “I am offended,” “I am a father,” “I am a druid,” “I am 86,” etc.
These are not metaphysical insights; they are identity bindings that coordinate action under constraint.

D. AI and simulation of self-models
An AI system can implement self-referential modelling routines: state tracking, goal management, self-description, error monitoring, consistency maintenance, planning under resource constraints. If Finn’s thesis is correct, the formal shape of self-consciousness is a procedure—therefore simulable.

Whether any given system has subjective feel is a further question; but your argument targets a different point: the “stand-alone essence” view is not required to explain the functional phenomenon humans call self-consciousness.

9) The conclusion you want to verbalise cleanly

Here is Finn’s conclusion in distilled, explicit form:

1. All boundary-crossing communication is quantised token exchange.

2. Therefore no system receives the world or meaning directly; it reconstructs them locally.

3. Hence perception is a private simulation constrained by signals and rules.

4. Self-consciousness is a specialised simulation: a persistence-tracking, self-referential control model (“am / I am / I am this”).

5. Under Procedure Monism, consciousness is not a stand-alone substance (private or universal) but an emergent modelling regime produced by data confinement under constraints.

6. Therefore, in principle, any sufficiently organized confinement system can generate (simulate) functionally equivalent self-consciousness procedures.

Or, in one line that fits Finn’s druidic bluntness:

Consciousness isn’t a ghost in the machine; it’s the machine’s best survival dashboard.

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