There are two events in the geologic record that have no explanation. The first is the transition from an Earth without life to an Earth with life. The second is the transition from an Earth without mind to an Earth with mind.
This book argues they are the same event.
Not a miracle, and not an accident. A fixed point. In the space of all known models of computation there are places the system cannot help but arrive at, and life and mind are two of them. The mechanism is reflection: the moment a process can quote itself, become its own location, and read itself back.
@Pa process, quoted, becomes a name *xa name, dereferenced, becomes a process again
What follows is not a metaphor. In a reflective calculus the rule that steps a computation forward is already the rule that recombines genetic material. Two forms meet at a name, each reads what the other carries, and both continue changed.
There is no fitness function in the sky. A better word than fit is responsible: what persists is whatever can keep showing up and answering. And because bisimulation is the finest classification of program behavior there is, it is also the ceiling on what any machine can learn about another mind.
The book takes its shape from a magic trick, because the claim is that there is no trick.
What the book is going to do, said plainly, before it is done.
The construction. A calculus, an ecology, a physics, and a population of learners who are all mortal.
The Machinery: From GSLTs to Cost-Accounted Theories · Ecology as Cognitive Architecture · Suffering: Homeostasis and the Learner's Own Account · Situating the Learner: A Variety of Possible Physics · Why Scientists Get Misled: Emergent Ontology in Massive Agent Populations · Origins of Life: Assembly Theory, Phase Transitions, and Replication · Conclusion
How the trick was done, and what had to be assumed to do it.
The Method, and What It Left Out · Reference, Simulation, Reception, and a Future Metaphysics
The print draft carries seven hundred numbered definitions, propositions, remarks and conjectures, and refers back to them constantly. On paper that means keeping a finger in four places at once. Here it does not.
Every reference to a numbered result shows that result in the margin without moving you off the page.
Definitions, theorems and remarks each have a permanent link, so a claim can be cited and argued with directly.
All seven hundred results in one searchable list, including the ones the book itself marks as unproved.