The Emergence of Subjective Reality

Chapter 2. The Emergence of Subjective Reality

Convolution, splice, chain · Three levels of the subjective · Bidirectionality · Closing the full circle

2. 1. Statement of the question

Chapter 1 showed that classical approaches to consciousness run up against one of two dead-end positions: either to posit consciousness as a separate substance (dualism), or to reduce it to material processes without remainder (reductionism). Both positions are equally incapable of describing the main thing — that the subject lives in its own space of objects: it sees things, understands meanings, experiences the ought and the is as distinct. This space we call subjective reality.

The present chapter answers the question: how does such a reality arise? The answer is built not through an enumeration of properties, but through the demonstration of a structural mechanism. The leading entity here is the transformation, not the map: primary is the operation that generates a level, and maps are objects within transformations, their content. One and the same transformation, applied successively three times, generates three qualitatively distinct levels of subjective reality. The mechanism is described and justified in the book GNSS on the material of the evolution of life. In GTOM we use it as a ready-made architectural construction for the analysis of consciousness.

2. 2. What subjective reality is

By subjective reality in GTOM is meant the space in which the subject lives — a space with its own objects, its own metric, its own laws. It is important to remove at once the idealist bias: subjective reality is not a «reflection of the world» in the sense of a copy, but neither is it torn away from the world. It is built out of the world and tested by it — one can be wrong about it. Imagination, prediction, and practical action (treated in Chapters 6 and 9) make sense only insofar as there exists a real world relative to which a prediction comes true or not, and an action succeeds or fails. Subjective reality is the shore at which perception lands, not a picture that replaces the shore.

The objects of subjective reality are not reducible to the objects of the external world: a point of a surface, a recognizable thing, a planned action, a symbol, a narrative, a concept, a contradiction — these are ontologically distinct entities, not different «levels of abstraction of the same thing».

Subjective realities are not one but several, and they are nested in one another. Each upper one arises from the lower through a definite transformation and relies on the lower as its material. Each higher one gives the subject a qualitatively new class of possibilities, not derivable from the lower ones, and at the same time does not exist without them.

Any subjective reality is realized physically: through specialized nervous tissue in humans and animals, through corresponding technical structures in the engineering realization of Gativus. But it is impossible to describe it through physical properties alone: the same cluster of neurons, considered from one side, is a piece of tissue, and from the other side is a map of space or a network of concepts. These are not two worlds and not two layers, but two ontological projections of one and the same organization. Matter and information here are not opposites, but complementary modes of describing one structure. This removes the classical psychophysical problem: the question «how does matter give rise to consciousness» is wrongly posed, because it presupposes a gap where there is no gap.

2. 3. The basic mechanism: convolution, splice, chain

The transformation that generates subjective reality consists of three steps. They repeat at every level without change in form — only the ontology of the objects on which they work, and the resources they use, change.

The first step is convolution. This is a passage into a space of another ontological nature. A vector in the source space is fed in; a vector in a space whose objects have a fundamentally different nature is given out. Technically, convolution is realized through a trainable kernel that extracts invariants from a multitude of concrete cases. The meaning of convolution is detachment from the concreteness of the previous level. The coordinates in which a point of a surface is described are not reducible to the features of an object; the features of an object are not reducible to a symbol; a narrative about justice is not reducible to the concept of justice. Each convolution is a new ontology, appearing out of the accumulated experience of the lower level.

The second step is the splice. The splice does not change the ontology: it works within an already established space. Its task is to link the objects of this space into meaningful structures through triplets with a connective vector. The general form of the splice is node — connective — node: the outer components are objects of the space, the middle is a vector denoting the relation between them. The splice adds to the static map of objects an axis of dynamics: distance, path, transition.

The third step is the chain. Over the ready splices a sequence is built up: a schema in which splices are linked into a branching graph. The chain gives the level its extended structures — behavioral sequences, reasonings, histories of volitional resolutions. The objects of the chain are the splices themselves plus the technique of linking them.

Convolution, splice, and chain together constitute one transformation. At each of the three levels of subjective reality this transformation repeats, yielding a series of spaces: one through convolution, the second through a splice over the first, the third through a chain over the second. The sources of data and the ontologies differ, the general schema is one. Maps are designated by the GNSS grid: the first digit is the level of the transformation, the second is the level of complexity within it.

Table 2.1. The three applications of the transformation.

The reversibility of the transformation is of fundamental importance. Each step works in both directions. The direct direction is cognition: the organism perceives the world and builds information structures over perception. The reverse direction is the subject's influence on the world: internal structures are deconvolved back into actions that change external reality. At the lower level (GTR1) the reverse direction works only partially, within the subject. At the two upper levels it becomes full — and this emergence of a full reverse deconvolution is a separate plot, to which we return below.

2. 4. The first subjective reality: space, objects, behavior

The first application of the transformation yields a subjective reality common to all animals with a nervous system and a capacity for locomotion. This reality is built out of a series of linked spaces.

MP10 — the spatial map. Its basic unit is the L-component, representing one point of space with its status (surface, boundary, gateway) and its connections to neighboring points. The totality of L-components forms a multimap: a multitude of local elementary lattices, linked by gateway L-components. It is fundamentally important that this map is not given ready-made: it is built only in movement. Sensory readings, concorded with the organism's own movements, gradually fill the empty L-components with concrete content. Blind-born rats form normal place cells — what is critical for building the map is precisely movement, not the specific sensory channel. Space as a subjective reality is walkable space.

MP11 — the object map. It arises from MP10 through convolution: the kernel takes a fragment of the spatial map and converts it into a vector of object space. The output is a node representing a recognized object. An object in MP11 is not a pixel and not a point of space, but an invariant: that which is recognized in different poses, angles, and lightings as one and the same. The nodes of MP11 are linked not by geometric adjacencies, but by relations of similarity, participation, hierarchy. The experiments of Blakemore and Cooper showed that the training of the convolution depends irreversibly on early experience: kittens raised in an environment with only vertical contours do not distinguish horizontal ones. This is direct evidence that object reality is not given at birth — it is formed through the convolution of accumulated perceptual experience.

An important feature of MP11 is that it is a multimap: a multitude of small elementary maps of fixed size, not one large coordinate sheet. The splices and chains of GTR1 live within these small maps; passing to a neighboring map through a gateway is significantly harder. This limitation will become key in the transition to GTR2.

MP12 — the operation (splice). Object nodes are linked by b-vectors into OPRN triplets — «subject — action — object». This is the minimal structure of a meaningful action and the only level where the splice has a distinguished subject pole: a physical action has an agent. The b-vector denotes a displacement in space — a path from the current position to the goal one.

MP13 — the event schema (chain). OPRN operations are linked into BLOM — stable behavioral sequences: hunting, nest-building, the mating ritual. Each such schema is a branching graph of episodes, lying within the bounds of one elementary map MP11. With the appearance of MP13 subjective reality acquires for the first time a time axis: up to this level everything was the statics of space and objects, now a «before» and «after», a past and a future, arise. Time is the product of MP13 — a sequence generated by the change of object positions, not an independent axis.

A fundamental feature of GTR1 is the asymmetry of its reversibility. Convolution works fully: the external world is convolved into maps through the senses. Deconvolution works only internally: the organism can «replay» a plan over the event schema, but cannot deconvolve the content of its maps into the external environment as an information structure. It is able only to act — to move, to change position, to interact physically with objects. This is the subjective reality of the animal: rich within, closed in the present, incapable of carrying its content outward as meaning.

This closure has a second, harsher consequence. The maps of GTR1 are small: the routes of MP12 and the event schemas of MP13 are built within the bounds of one elementary map, and are therefore physically short. An animal that thinks only in GTR1 cannot build a path from one city to another: such a path fits into no single map, and to stitch thousands of maps through gateways is unrealistic. The famous evidence of this limit is Wolfgang Köhler's experiments with chimpanzees (1917). Sultan joined two short sticks and reached a banana — but the solution arose only when the tools and the goal were encompassed in a single glance. Where a tool fell out of the field of view, the task became sharply harder: what is not in the current scene does not exist for GTR1. It is precisely this wall that the next level breaks through.

2. 5. The second subjective reality: symbols and narratives

The second application of the transformation yields a subjective reality in which information is detached from concrete place and time. This is the level at which language, thought about the absent, and developed planning appear. Both limitations of GTR1 — attachment to the present and the limit of length — are removed by one and the same acquisition: the symbol.

MP21 — the symbol map. It arises by convolution from the maps of GTR1. It is fundamental that the convolution of GTR2 is indifferent to the type of the entity convolved. One can convolve a point — a single object MP11; one can convolve a line — a separate splice MP12; one can convolve a whole event schema MP13. And all three yield a symbol of one and the same dimensionality and one and the same status. The convolution of the object «stone» yields one symbol; the convolution of the action «throw» yields one symbol; the convolution of the long chain «hunt» — with tracking, preparation, execution, and the division of the prey — also yields one symbol. In the volume convolved these cases are incommensurable, in the form of the result they are identical.

The symbol is arranged as a node (vector, name, parameters), but possesses a fundamentally new property: it is not attached to a point of space. The word «bird» is not located «here» or «there»; it exists as an independent information entity. And here is the key difference from the lower level: MP21 is one large map, not a multimap. Symbols convolved from different, physically unstitchable elementary maps MP11 turn out to be adjacent in a unified symbolic space. It is precisely this that removes the size limit of GTR1: between the symbols of two cities one can build a connection that had nowhere to arise on the short maps MP11. Thus appears a route from city to city — a gigantic plan not tied to the size of an elementary map. The multimap of GTR1 is good for navigation in familiar space — compact and locally complete; the unified map MP21 is good for discussing the nonexistent — open, flexible, allowing any symbols to be connected.

MP22 — the utterance (splice). Symbols are linked into KLEN triplets. In form this is the same stitching node–connective–node as in MP12, but the nature of the connective is different. If the b-vector denoted a physical displacement, the connective of MP22 is a logical expression: causality, belonging, opposition, implication. Where MP12 built movement, MP22 builds a judgment — a step from what is done to what can be said and thought in detachment from immediate execution. Here there is already no distinguished subject pole: two symbols are linked as homogeneous nodes.

MP23 — the narrative (chain). KLEN utterances are linked into KLOM — narratives. A narrative can be a simple assertion, an unfolded reasoning, or a complex theory; all of them are objects of MP23, differing only in size and structure. As the order of events in MP13 generated physical time, so the order of utterances in MP23 generates narrated time — a sequence detached from immediate observation. One can tell of a past that is no longer, and of a future that is not yet.

A fundamental property of GTR2 is bidirectionality, absent at GTR1. Convolution still gives cognition: behavioral experience is convolved into symbols, symbols into narratives. But now to this is added the reverse direction: a symbol can be deconvolved back into an object MP11; a narrative — into a spatial scene with objects and actions. Uttering the word «apple», a person is able to imagine a concrete apple with color, shape, weight. Reading «a book lies on the table», he sees the table, the lighting, the spine. This is imagination — not arbitrary fantasy, but a structured downward deconvolution of the symbolic form back into a vivid representation. Deconvolution is possible because in convolution the coordinates are not lost: the symbol MP21 carries the data for the reverse mapping into a scene.

Hegel called this movement the return of spirit from the abstract to the concrete. In architectural terminology, GTR2 is a two-way channel between the symbolic and perceptual levels. The upward direction gives the ability to think about the absent; the downward — the ability to represent the absent vividly. The empirical evidence of the reverse channel is the method of loci (memory by places): by artificially activating the path MP21 → MP10, a person memorizes abstract material by placing it along familiar places. The cycle «convolution → narrative → reverse deconvolution → new perceptual material → new convolution» works continuously and constitutes the structure of what we experience as thinking.

The second subjective reality is specifically human. Higher animals have rudiments of symbolic communication and limited imagination, but the full bidirectionality of GTR2 — with coherent grammar, unfolded narratives, the capacity for counterfactual thinking — is present only in the human.

2. 6. The third subjective reality: concepts, contradictions, will

The third application of the transformation yields a subjective reality in which values, obligations, and personality proper as a subject appear.

MP31 — the concept map. It arises from the maps of GTR2 through convolution: the kernel takes a multitude of narratives in which a stable theme runs — care, protection, justice, truth — and converts them into a vector of conceptual space. The object obtained is a concept. What is here called a concept, Hegel called the notion (Begriff) and placed at the foundation of his logic — the movement of thought in the pure element of notions, detached both from things and from the stories about them. The concept retains a structure that allows the quality to be recognized in new, unfamiliar situations. Like MP21, MP31 is one large map, not a multimap: concepts of different origin coexist side by side on a unified field.

MP32 — will (splice). Let us ask what the distance between two concepts is. Neither a path nor a predicate — between them lies a contradiction. Take capitalism and communism: they are divided by the measure of their opposition. Contradiction is the vector of GTR3, isomorphic to the b-vector and the logical connective of the lower levels in its role as a connective, but not in its content. And since there is a vector, there is also a splice: contradiction allows two concepts to be stitched into a unit of a new kind — WILL. To stitch two concepts in spite of the contradiction dividing them is to make an effort against the rupture; this effort is will. Will, therefore, is not a separate mystical force added to cognition from outside, but the splice of the conceptual level. The resolution of a contradiction does not annihilate it: the sublated contradiction is preserved as a passed node, as experience that now belongs to the subject. In Hegel this sublation is the motor of all development; by the same productive contradiction the splice WILL is moved as well.

Here it is necessary to name the seam of the isomorphism directly. The convolutions of GTR1 and GTR2 yielded at the output a pure invariant — an object, a symbol. The convolution of GTR3 yields a concept with an additional structure that the lower convolutions do not have: a split into the is and the ought. The source of this split is not the convolution itself, but the social level: the ought comes from the shared concepts of culture (see § «Emergent subjective realities» and Chapter 8), and is not generated by the individual convolution out of narratives. Therefore the three convolutions are not fully isomorphic at the output: at the upper level a value polarization of social origin is added to the invariant. This is not a defect of the architecture, but the exact place where the individual is interwoven with the collective.

MP33 — Personality (chain). WILL splices are linked into WLOM — a local map whose content is Personality. Personality is a schema of sublated contradictions: not a set of views and not a sum of opinions, but a stitched structure of which contradictions of concepts the subject has resolved and in what way. Each node of WLOM is a sublated contradiction, preserved as passed; the whole map is a history of volitional resolutions. A person is what contradictions he has sublated and how: what he gave up, what he preferred, through which ruptures he led his will. Personality is not given in advance — it is built, node by node, by each act of sublation. This link is absent in Hegel: he brought the movement of notions to self-development, but did not place under it a local map of individual resolutions; the isomorphism of the levels requires it — if there is BLOM and KLOM, then at the level of contradictions there must be WLOM.

The third transformation is bidirectional just as the second, but its reverse direction has a special name — will as act. The upward direction gives the subject a representation of its own concepts and contradictions; this is mainly an observational process. The downward is will proper: a resolved contradiction is deconvolved into a narrative at the level of GTR2 (will dictates which of the possible stories to tell), the narrative into an event schema at the level of GTR1, the schema into a physical action that changes the external world. Will reaches the body through two stories of deconvolution: concept → narrative → event → movement.

This is the full closure of the circle. Only at GTR3 does subjective reality gain the possibility to deconvolve from its upper level back through all the lower ones down to a change of the material environment. Animals have GTR1 in its entirety; higher animals have rudiments of GTR2; the full reverse deconvolution from the conceptual level to physical action is performed only by the human. At this moment all four transformations, from the cellular GTR0 to the conceptual GTR3, act as a single whole. This closure is not the ceiling of the theory: it passes the baton upward, to the question of the compact transmissible pole of the whole information circuit (IDEA), which is treated in the book Metaphysics.

2. 7. Emergent subjective realities

Up to now the discussion has been of the subjective reality of a single organism. But the human does not live alone. Above the level of individual maps yet another quality is distinguished — emergent constructions, representing the joint subjective reality of a group.

It is fundamentally important what an emergent construction is not. It has no carrier of its own: there is no hardware, no place where it would lie. All the information remains physically in the individual maps of the subjects. An emergent construction is not a thing, but a point of view on a multitude of individual maps, a point of view that has its own significance. The exemplary case is language: it belongs to no single person, one cannot point to where it is stored, and yet it exists as long as many use it. Therefore here there are no new transitions: the emergent level lies in the same space as the individual, on the same coordinate axes — there is nowhere to pass. There is neither convolution nor splice; there is the extraction of a common quality in a unified space. The former notation of emergent domains (the DOM abbreviations) is abandoned by the new edition: this level has no maps and no numbers of its own, and it is more natural to call its constructions by ordinary names.

A series of emergent constructions is built up over the individual levels: shared behavior (over the behavior of GTR1), shared symbols — language as a vocabulary (over the symbols of GTR2), shared constructs — grammar (over the technique of linking symbols), shared narratives — myths and history (over the narratives of GTR2), shared concepts — meanings carried beyond any individual (over the concepts of GTR3), shared contradictions (over the contradictions of GTR3), and the shared personality as the apex of the series.

The content of the emergent level is fed by two streams. The vertical one comes from below: a shared symbol is distinguished out of the individual symbols of many subjects. The horizontal one goes sideways, along the emergent level itself: one construction flows out of another — shared contradictions out of shared concepts, the shared personality out of shared contradictions. Physically the information still comes from below (there is nowhere else), but logically the connection goes along the emergent level, from neighbor to neighbor. The presence of the horizontal stream is what makes the emergent level a subject, and not a passive mirror of the lower one.

Hence a gradient of subjecthood: the horizontal stream increases from left to right along the series. Shared behavior has no horizontal stream at all — a pack does exactly what its members do, and has no autonomy from them. Toward the right edge the stream thickens: the shared personality is determined from below the least and is almost autonomous from those through whom it physically exists. Subjecthood at the emergent level does not switch on by a jump — it increases.

For GTOM an important position follows from this: the subjective reality of each person already contains within itself imprints of collective realities. Without shared symbols the individual symbol map is not built — the cases of Genie and Victor confirm: in full linguistic isolation the symbol map does not come together beyond a primitive form, and the critical period for its formation closes irreversibly. Without shared narratives a rich narrative map does not arise — the narrative experience accumulated by humanity serves as raw material for individual thinking. Without shared concepts and shared contradictions a mature concept map does not come together — notions of justice, honor, duty are formed under the pressure of the shared ideals and shared contradictions of culture. Here too lies the source of the value polarization «is/ought» noted above: the ought comes to the individual concept from this level.

This removes the classical opposition of the individual and the social. The social does not stand opposed to the individual and is not «built up» over it as a new story: it is architecturally embedded in individual subjective reality from the moment of its formation. The full theory of inter-individual dynamics constitutes a separate topic and is treated in detail in Chapter 8.

2. 8. The hierarchy of subjective realities

The three levels of the subjective form a strict hierarchy. Each upper level gives something not derivable from the lower ones, and at the same time is impossible without them.

Table 2.2. What each level of subjective reality newly gives.

Each subjective reality opens to the subject a new ontological dimension. GTR1 gives the world of the present: that which is here and now. GTR2 gives the world of the absent: that which is not here, or not now, or nowhere in physical space, but is as meaning. GTR3 gives the world of the ought: that which ought to be, as distinct from that which is.

The dependence from below upward is categorical. Concepts are empty without narratives — learned words without content do not come together into a Begriff, however they be memorized. Narratives are empty without behavioral experience — symbols not tied to the subject's own operations remain formal marks. Behavior is empty without a spatial map — it is impossible to act in a world that has not come together as space. Precisely for this reason the development of consciousness in ontogenesis always goes from below upward, through threshold periods, and the skipping of any of the early stages irreversibly limits all subsequent ones. This topic is treated in detail in Chapter 8.

At the same time each upper level is not reducible to the lower ones. The concept of justice is not the sum of narratives about justice — it is an invariant extracted from this multitude by convolution and possessing its own ontology. A narrative is not reducible to a sequence of symbols; a symbol is not reducible to a fragment of behavior. Convolution is not summation and not generalization in the logical sense. It is a change of ontology.

2. 9. The meaning of the term «emergence»

Let us return to the title of the chapter. What does it mean that subjective reality «emerges»? In GTOM this term is understood strictly: subjective reality does not appear as a separate entity and does not «emerge» in a sense requiring an additional ontology. It arises structurally — as the result of applying a definite transformation to the material of the lower level.

Subjective reality is the name for a definite structure of the organization of matter — a structure in which one and the same transformation (convolution, splice, chain) is applied three times at different ontological levels. Each application yields a new subjective reality. Each time the result is not reducible to the lower level, because the ontology of the objects changes. Each time the result relies on the lower level, because its convolution is trained precisely on the lower material.

Thus the «hard problem of consciousness» is dissolved in its original formulation — dissolved, not solved. As said in Chapter 1, this dissolution is the result of the adopted methodological choice, not a proof that experience is identical to its architecture. The question «why does subjective experience exist at all?» tacitly presupposes that subjective experience is something additional to the structure of matter and therefore requires a special explanation. Within the architectural approach subjective experience is not additional — it is the name for this very structure, and for each level a necessary condition of its existence is established: the presence of a corresponding vector distance. The strong identification «distance is the experience in its entirety» remains a working position, not a proved result; the decomposition into necessary conditions, however, is robust against the philosophical-zombie objection.

This is not a denial of the enigmatic character of consciousness. The architectural answer shows where and how subjective reality arises; it leaves open many concrete questions — about the mechanisms of attention, about the nature of the self, about the correlation of levels in concrete phenomena. These questions are treated in subsequent chapters. But the fundamental obstacle — the notion of an insuperable gap between matter and the subject — is removed at the level of the very statement of the task.

2. 10. Conclusions

• Subjective reality is the space in which the subject lives. Its objects are ontologically distinct from the objects of the external world and are not reducible to them; at the same time it is built out of the world and tested by it — a shore, not a copy.

• There are three subjective realities, and they are nested in one another. Each arises from the lower through one and the same transformation: convolution, splice, chain.

• Convolution changes the ontology: it gives a space of objects of another nature. The splice does not change the ontology: it links nodes within a space by triplets «node–connective–node». The chain builds extended schemas over the splices.

• The first subjective reality (GTR1: MP10–MP13) — space, objects, behavior. The reality of the animal: rich within, closed in the present, with short maps and asymmetric reversibility.

• The second subjective reality (GTR2: MP21–MP23) — symbols and narratives. The symbol is convolved indifferently to the type of input; MP21 is a unified map, removing the size limit of GTR1. Bidirectionality: imagination as reverse deconvolution.

• The third subjective reality (GTR3: MP31–MP33) — concepts, contradictions, will. The vector of the level is the contradiction between concepts; the splice is will; the chain is Personality (WLOM). Full closure of the circle down to a change of the environment.

• The three convolutions are isomorphic in mechanism, but not fully at the output: the value split «is/ought» at the GTR3 level is an additional structure of social origin, not the load-bearing construction of the vector.

• Emergent constructions (shared symbols, narratives, concepts, contradictions, the shared personality) have no carrier of their own and form no new transitions; their subjecthood increases by a gradient as the horizontal stream grows.

• Each upper level is not derivable from the lower ones, but is impossible without them. The hierarchy from below upward is categorical: the skipping of an early stage irreversibly limits all subsequent ones.

• Subjective reality arises structurally. The «hard problem of consciousness» is dissolved at the level of the statement within the adopted method, not declared finally solved.