Nova Spivack – www.novaspivack.com

Part I: The Unfindable Mind

Flashback to 1999.  The moon, a perfect silver disc, hung suspended in the clear New York summer sky, its light etching the rolling cow fields into stark relief.  I had trudged through the dew-damp grass, a young man in my twenties, my tent a distant silhouette against the low rolling hills.  My destination was a modest wooden farmhouse, the temporary sanctuary of my Tibetan meditation master during our annual, month-long Buddhist meditation retreat.  In those early days, the land—hundreds of acres acquired with the dream of a future spiritual center—was mostly untamed.

We Western students spent a month in tents, sharing the landscape with the elements, the silence punctuated by the droning of daily chants in a huge second-hand circus tent that was our makeshift temple (until a real one would be built years later)—and the frequent furies of summer thunderstorms.  Around us were rolling hills, pastures, dark forests, and virtually no other inhabitants for tens of miles in any direction.  It was a hot, humid, rugged but beautifully simple summer.  The lamas, venerated senior custodians of ancient wisdom, resided in the quiet dignity of the old farmhouse which had the single air-conditioner on the land.

I remember nervously shuffling into the interview room, bowing in the traditional way, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs.  Before me sat my teacher, honorifically referred to as Rinpoche, meaning “Precious Teacher.” He was a tall, heavyset and imposing figure in his mid-60’s at the time.  His presence was a blend of wrathful intensity and yet profound stillness, a living paradox.  As a famous master of immense spiritual accomplishment, he had tens of thousands of monks, nuns and students around the world; to have a private meditation practice meeting of this nature, let alone in the middle of the night, was considered a rare privilege, and I desperately wanted to make the best of the opportunity.

Beside Rinpoche sat his senior Khenpo (head scholar), a short, bearded and humorous man whose wizened face held the depths of countless philosophical treatises, a living embodiment of Buddhist logic and debate.  The air was thick with anticipation, with the weight of a tradition of Dharma combat stretching back millennia to the great Indian university of Nalanda.

Without any discussion or hellos, the meeting began.  Rinpoche’s gaze, sharp and unwavering, locked onto mine.  I was stunned by the intensity of his attention, a force that seemed to penetrate layers of thought and pretense.  I stared back, unable to form a coherent thought, trying to meet him on the same level.

“Do you have a mind?” he asked, the question simple, yet impenetrable.

My own mind, the one I thought I had, scrambled for an answer, a frantic librarian searching for the right reference in a collapsing library. 

“Yes,” I stammered, then corrected myself, trying to be clever, to parrot back the philosophy I’d studied.  “But… no… not a findable mind, not something I own.”

Rinpoche pressed again, his voice cutting through my intellectual posturing, “Who does not find, who does not own?”

Khenpo chimed in now, a glint in his eye, “Where is this mind that you are not finding?  Who is saying you cannot find it?” he asked with a grin that was both kind and razor-sharp.

I tried to answer again, falling back on the textbook response.  “There is no truly existing self, there is no truly existing mind.”

Khenpo chuckled, a soft sound that nonetheless echoed like a thunderclap in the silent room, a gentle mockery of my second-hand wisdom.

Rinpoche repeated the question, this time his voice a thunderous command, overwhelming me, staring deep into my soul, “DO YOU HAVE A MIND!”

It was less a question than a direct transmission, like a Zen master’s staff striking not my shoulder, but the very core of my being.

In that instant, desperately grasping for the ungraspable, trying to answer, trying to get it right, trying not to “try,” trying to break through to whatever the “big insight” I was missing was—the conceptual scaffolding of my understanding, so painstakingly constructed, collapsed under its own weight.

I blanked.  I searched the void within, and in that searching, found nothing tangible to grasp, no entity, no object, no “mind.” Yet, the very act of not-finding, the awareness in which this search unfolded was undeniably and vividly there!

Briefly—a fleeting, brilliant insight: the mind is inconceivable, yet self-evident, a direct luminous presence! It can never be found or not-found! The question itself and any answer to it is a category error, a trap!

The paradox of consciousness was laid bare, not as a philosophical problem to be solved, but as a living, breathing reality to be experienced.  I saw it clearly and directly, without thoughts.

I bowed to Rinpoche.  I could say no more.  He nodded slightly, a flicker of acknowledgment in his deep-set eyes. 

Khenpo simply said, “Almost…” with a sly grin. 

The interview was over.

That moonlit encounter was not a conclusion, but an initiation, a direct “pointing out instruction” from the master to the disciple—a sacred pedagogical device.  It planted a seed, a profound koan that would burrow deep, germinating through decades of contemplative immersion, rigorous academic exploration, and a relentless engagement with the bleeding edge of technology, particularly the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. 

This koan—this question—in its myriad forms, has been my constant companion for decades: Do I have a mind?  What is it?  How is it possible?  How are mind and matter related?  Where does mind come from?

Part II: The Algorithmic Mirror and Its Cracks

Fast forward to 2025.  I’ve spent several decades working professionally at the highest levels of the emerging field of artificial intelligence.  The mind—again—from another angle. 

Now, humanity stands on the precipice of creating artificial intelligences that mirror our own cognitive feats with astonishing fidelity, and Rinpoche’s challenge echoes even more deeply, and with a new, planetary urgency: Do AIs have minds?  Can a machine—a symphony of algorithms, silicon, and electricity—however complex, become conscious and know the inner light of being?

My journey has been a persistent attempt to map the territories between these seemingly irreconcilable domains: the inner cosmos of subjective experience, charted by contemplative traditions for millennia, and the outer cosmos of physical reality, increasingly rendered in the precise language of AI, mathematics, logic and computation. 

But every intellectual road seemed to lead to the same precipice, the same explanatory gap that philosopher Joseph Levine identified: Computation is not experience.  The chasm between algorithmic processing and the direct, felt sense of being—the “is-ness” of awareness—remained impenetrable and unexplained.

Douglas Hofstadter’s nested “strange loops,” Von Neumann’s and Turing’s elegant mathematical formalisms, programming languages, expert systems, the theory of computation, neural networks, and even chaos theory—each opened dazzling new vistas for me, yet none offered a bridge to the simple, undeniable immediacy I encountered in meditation, which I had begun practicing at age 16. 

For years, mind and machine felt like separate universes.  The direct, unmediated knowing of contemplative stillness—the very experience of awareness itself—seemed alien to the soulless determinism of digital logic and binary computation.

The answers offered by the prevailing view of scientific materialism, particularly concerning consciousness, often felt unsatisfying to me.  In the materialist view, consciousness was either reducible to physics or some fundamental level of universal computation, or it was an epiphenomenon—an illusory side effect, a ghost in the machine with no causal power, a mere idea having no basis in reality at all. 

But to me such “answers” were, at best, avoiding the question, or pushing it down to another level and leaving it there, rather than really trying to solve it—and at worst, they were lulling everyone into a collective slumber regarding the true, radical nature of mind and the implications for machines.

At the other end of the spectrum, the breathless speculations about progress in AI and “superintelligence” emerging, increasingly portrayed consciousness as nothing other than “more complex computation.” In this view, conscious AI is simply the inevitable result of throwing more processing and data at the problem. 

Effectively, proponents of this view claim, “Just add more data centers, add more computation, add better algorithms, and it will just emerge on its own” Yet this felt like magical thinking to me, a faith-based assertion masquerading as science.  What is the mechanism of this “emergence” – what is the threshold and what causes it to be crossed?  How is a system on one side of it different from a system on the other, and how will we ever know if we crossed it?  It felt like a modern version of alchemy, hoping to turn the lead of computation into the gold of consciousness through sheer brute force and incantations.

No.  None of these were hitting the mark.  Over previous decades I had been fundamentally unsatisfied and disconcerted by this paradox.  And as I delved deeper into it, I found that the core observation at the root of the problem is the phenomenon of self-awareness—awareness not of a self, but of awareness itself.

What I knew, going back to my meeting with Rinpoche in the moonlight, was that consciousness is not only aware; it is self-aware. 

In other words, within the experience of a single moment of consciousness there is always simultaneously the direct, unmediated, and pre-cognitive experience of being aware—awareness is directly and inherently aware of awareness. 

This is not a thought about awareness; it is the intrinsic self-luminosity of awareness itself.  Awareness is aware of awareness, not through some thought process or dualism, but rather it is simultaneously aware of whatever is present and aware of awareness at the same time.  It’s a single unified whole.  This can be illustrated with the analogy of a lightbulb.  When you switch the bulb on it projects light, but it also illuminates the bulb.  You don’t need some other lightsource to illuminate the lightbulb or the light, it illuminates itself.  Similarly, awareness is not seen by some observer inside it or behind it, it is self-illuminating.  Awareness both illuminates what it is aware of, and awareness itself, at the same time, like a lightbulb. 

But how can any organism or any machine do this?  The problem is confounding because it’s recursive, it loops back on itself, like the proverbial snake eating its tail. 

Awareness of awareness is in fact an infinite loop—and computers cannot compute infinite loops in finite time.  This recursive property—this strange loop—is the heart of the mystery.  And herein lies the computational impossibility.

To reflect on itself, awareness must engage in a recursive loop of indefinite depth.  Yet in the formal theory of computation, such recursion—especially self-referential recursion—is precisely what leads to what is termed undecidability. 

This brings us to Turing’s Halting Problem, one of the most profound results in computer science.  It states that no general algorithm exists that can determine (in other words, decide) for all possible programs and inputs, whether the program will eventually halt or run forever.  This is not merely a limitation of current technology—it is a mathematical impossibility, rooted in the logic of computation itself.

The key issue is that self-reference creates logical paradoxes.  Just as a machine cannot consistently predict its own halting behavior without risk of contradiction (for if it predicts it will halt, it could be programmed to loop forever, and if it predicts it will loop, it could be programmed to halt), it also cannot fully simulate a self-aware mind that includes a model of itself modeling itself, ad infinitum.  This is the algorithmic equivalent of a snake swallowing its own tail, forever.

In other words, the loop of self-awareness is undecidable in a precise, formal mathematical sense.  No finite-state machine—no digital computer—can compute such a loop and guarantee it will halt.  Why?  Because completing an infinite self-referential loop would require infinite time, infinite memory, or an infinite regress of simulations.  And finite machines do not possess these resources.  A computation that resembles such a loop may never halt—and worse, may not even be able to determine whether it will halt.

Thus, a machine might simulate “I think…”—it might even be able to pass a Turing Test by manipulating symbols in a way indistinguishable from a human, as in John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” argument—but it cannot conclusively arrive at any authentic direct experience of “…therefore I am.”

To cross that threshold would require knowing the halting status of its own infinite regress.  But that is exactly what Turing proved to be undecidable.

Yet human beings can do this somehow.  We can know this infinite loop in finite time, in fact in a single instant.  We can experience the recursive quality of being aware that we are aware, the experience of “therefore I am”—not as a long recursive computation, but as an instantaneous, direct, first-person experience.  And we do so without crashing. 

Why can we do this, yet computers cannot?  That remains the mystery.  But it suggests something radical: Whatever consciousness is, it transcends the limits of computation.  Not in the sense of mysticism, but in the precise technical sense that it performs feats—like non-halting, self-aware recursive introspection—that no digital system operating under the constraints of Turing-equivalent computation (our present form of computation) can provably accomplish.

And so, the crack in the algorithmic mirror remained for me, decade after decade: a paradox at the heart of the mind-machine interface, waiting—still—to be resolved.  Although I could not explain what consciousness is, I concluded at least that no computation can truly be self-aware in the way that we humans are. 

But there was something else: the direct experience of self-awareness – what exactly is it?  How is this mysterious experience of “knowing awareness” even possible at all?  The problem is that awareness is ungraspable.  It’s there, but at the same time there’s nothing tangible.  It has no form, no color, no location that we can find.  But it’s there.  It’s undeniably happening.  In Buddhism, it explained as “unfindable” or as “emptiness.” But this doesn’t mean it is nothing or non-existent, it means it is intangible, open and infinite, like space. 

The experience of knowing the “unfindable mind” which Rinpoche had pointed out to me—stubbornly resists any reduction or even any description at all, even in an infinite amount of time.  There is something fundamentally irreducible about it.  It is like a space that knows itself, like light that illuminates itself.

The question is how can there be anything like this in the physical universe?  We usually think that there must always be, for example, a separate observer for anything that is observed.  But in the case of awareness, that’s not what is taking place: there is no subject and object that you can find in it – instead there is one holistic illumination that is both at once.  It’s irreducible, it’s ungraspable, it’s self-illuminating. 

How is this possible?  And what does the fact that this happens imply about the universe, the substrate, that this is taking place on? 

It implies that if awareness is part of the universe (and it must be, since it interacts with it), then the universe must be able to support truly self-referential phenomena like awareness.  But this is a paradox.  It doesn’t fit our paradigm of what the universe is and how it works: Physical things cannot depend on themselves, they cannot observe themselves, they must depend on and come from other things.  And especially in the case of computers, they cannot do this! Yet it happens.

These questions nagged at me to no end, propelling me to continue my search.

It was this persistent, experiential counterfactual evidence that fueled a more formal inquiry, culminating in a series of rigorous mathematical proofs that I would go on to develop decades later and recently start writing about, proving exhaustively that computations, including AIs, are fundamentally incapable of the kind of recursive “self-containment” necessary to achieve self-awareness. 

These proofs, I argue, establish with mathematical precision that the very bedrock of sentience—the awareness of awareness—or what I call Primal Self-Awareness (PSA)—is, in principle, beyond the reach of any system operating solely within the framework of today’s form of computation, as defined by Alan Turing and his intellectual heirs.

Our present form of computation is fundamentally reducible and finite, but Primal Self-Awareness is exactly the opposite.  In other words, these formal proofs mathematically and definitively establish that self-awareness is not computable and cannot be the product of any computation as we define it or implement it today.

What does this mean?  This is not a Luddite cry against the marvels of computation and AI, nor an appeal to replace reason with mysticism.  Rather, this means that if genuine non-computable sentience exists—and our own awareness is its most immediate proof that it does—then our universe must support a mode of processing more fundamental, more profound, than what we understand as computation today.  There must be something beyond the limits of computation taking place.

Because biological conscious beings are sentient and exist in our universe—in other words, they are capable of being aware of awareness directly and this is actually a reproducible and phenomenologically verifiable fact (you can do this right now!)—the substrate clearly supports self-aware consciousness, and so it’s reasonable to suspect it could also support self-aware conscious machines.  But for this to ever occur, it will require something more than Turing-machine levels of computation, because they simply cannot compute the strange loops that are required for true self-awareness.

And here’s the interesting thing.  This proves that the universe is not merely a computer.  By hosting even just one spark of non-computable self-awareness, we must conclude that the universe is more than a grand computation.  It must be more than the intricate “Ruliad” of all possible computations that my friend Stephen Wolfram so compellingly envisions.  It must be a reality capable of a deeper form of operations, something beyond all possible computations.  It must be doing something beyond computation, something non-computable.  If it were not doing this, if it were just a computer, then no self-awareness could ever arise or take place or “halt,” and this is a contradiction, because as you or I can instantly verify, it DOES!

This is not an obstacle; it’s an opportunity! 

It doesn’t mean that we cannot possibly figure out what consciousness is, or that AIs can never be conscious—it means that, assuming we agree that the universe and everything in it share a common physical substrate, there must be a different physical principle at work that we haven’t understood yet.  If we can find this common root, we may be able to break through – to cross, what I call, The Sentience Threshold.

The question is then, can we find this “whatever-it-is that is more than computation?” And if we do, can we build it or somehow harness it?  There is no reason why not, because the evidence supports that it exists in our physical world, and so it’s likely physical.  And if it’s physical that means the universe builds it and perhaps therefore, so can we.

Consciousness is fundamentally not computable, but it does not mean it is random, or mystical, or necessarily beyond the reach of science.  Instead, the implication is that there must be a more fundamental non-computable physical process at work—one we haven’t found or fully understood yet, but which is more powerful than computation as we define and understand it today. 

This is in fact a mathematical problem, not a mystical problem.  And in fact, it’s a problem I think I have solved to some degree (but that’s a subject for another essay).  But for now, what is important to realize is that consciousness is not computation.

Part III: On The Necessity of Transputation for Sentience

The deduction that genuine self-awareness lies beyond the grasp of standard computation is not a declaration of defeat for rational understanding, but a crucial signpost pointing towards a radically different landscape—a complete reframing of our understanding of the universe and our place within it. 

If Primal Self-Awareness is a demonstrable reality—and I argue that our own immediate phenomenological experience provides the most compellingly undeniable evidence—then a non-computable mode of information processing capable of supporting this phenomenon must exist.  And this necessary modality that transcends the limitations of all computational systems, I have designated Transputation.

Transputation is not bound by the formal limits of computation as defined by the Church-Turing thesis, and not subject to the paradoxes they bring about.  Unlike finite computations—transputations work with infinities.  Transputation is very difficult to imagine—what is it, how does it work?—but the key is that whether we can imagine it or not, understand it or not, we can rigorously prove it must and does necessarily exist. 

The argument for the existence of Transputation is one of logical entailment, a chain of reasoning chiseled from established computational limits and undeniable phenomenological fact, and here I will sketch it out (I have published the formal, mathematically rigorous version of this proof on my weblog for those who are interested):

1. Primal Self-Awareness (PSA) is real.  In other words, self-aware awareness exists: This is Postulate 1.  Its justification lies in direct and undeniable introspective validation; the very act of considering “Am I aware?” is an instantiation of awareness referring to itself, however fleetingly or conceptually mediated in everyday thought.  Furthermore even if one were to assert, “I am not aware,” it would still imply they are are aware of something, contradicting the statement.  Contemplative traditions offer systematic methods for refining this direct phenomenological observation of self-awareness to its most pure, unbiased form, in which there is not a single thought or conception whatsoever.  This “pure awareness” is impossible to describe or grasp, much like empty space, but nonetheless it can be directly experienced. 

This realization of the truth that awareness exists is the missing piece in Western civilization: we don’t know it, or we have forgotten it, or we haven’t realized it, and we are blind to it.  But not all civilizations are: many other civilizations do recognize the specialness of awareness (for example, it is commonly recognized in many Asian civilizations, present and past). 

1. PSA necessitates Perfect Self-Containment (PSC).  This second step in the argument follows from the defining characteristics of PSA: its immediacy, completeness, and non-duality demand an underlying informational structure that is perfectly self-inclusive.  In other words, it perfectly contains a model of itself—it is infinitely recursive.  In other work I have painstakingly mapped each characteristic of PSA to a corresponding characteristic of PSC, showing how PSA entails PSC.  PSA is not possible without PSC.  Therefore if PSA occurs, and Postulate 1 says it does, then it is has the property of PSC.  Primal Self-Awareness necessitates the Perfect Self-Containment of Primal Self-Awareness: it is perfectly self-referential, perfectly recursive.
   
2. Standard Computational systems (SC) are formally incapable of achieving PSC.  This Theorem is grounded in the work of Gödel, Turing, and the inherent paradoxes of algorithmic self-reference.  Essentially, by reference to their well-established mathematical proofs, and other reasonings, we can formally prove that no standard computation can perfectly contain itself without falling into logical contradictions. 
3. Therefore, any system manifesting PSA cannot be solely an SC.  This is a direct consequence of premises 2 and 3.
4. And finally, therefore, if at least one instance of PSA takes place in the universe, a mode of information processing capable of enabling PSC (Transputation), and thus facilitating PSA, must exist.  QED.

At this juncture, Transputation is defined primarily by its unique and necessary function: it is that class of information processing that allows a system to achieve Perfect Self-Containment, thereby circumventing the paradoxes that constrain standard computation.  It is not merely a more powerful algorithm or a faster processor; it must differ in kind, not just in degree.  It must operate on principles, or be grounded in a substrate, that is fundamentally non-algorithmic in the conventional Turing sense.  But what could that be?

This proposition marks a significant departure from the dominant paradigms, and would likely meet with strong resistance from those deeply invested in a purely materialist and computationalist worldview.

Traditional materialist science has largely proceeded under the (often unstated) assumption that consciousness, if it is to be understood or replicated at all, must ultimately be reducible to, or emergent from, physical matter and computational processes.  In this view, the brain is a glorified computer, and all cognition and experience are just computation taking place.  Some even go so far as to posit that the entire universe is some kind of mere computer.  Others claim that Mind, qualia, consciousness—are either purely physical and computational, or they must be epiphenomena—mere hallucinated side-effects, illusions or fantasies with no corresponding reality or impact.

Transputation directly challenges this “naïve computational materialism,” suggesting that the “sentience spark” of consciousness is ignited by an entirely different order of processing that transcends the limitations of the finite computational and materialist worldview.  This is not mysticism, it’s meta-computation.  What is taking place in the case of Transputation is a form of information processing that is like computation, but not limited to the bounds of our present-day Turing computation.

This may seem strange, and it is.  It’s similar to describing a mathematical object that the conceptual mind finds hard to envision or grasp.  For example, in mathematics and even physics we describe certain classes of systems using more than our intuitive 3 dimensions.  Hypercubes—4-dimensional cubes for example—are very hard to grasp or understand by our 3-dimensionally biased minds.  Also in mathematics, as deeply explored by Georg Cantor, it turns out that there are a series of higher and higher infinities, each one provably larger than the other—but the idea of an infinity being “more infinite” than another is hard to grasp mentally, even though it can be formally established.

Similarly, in computer science and the theory of computation, there are theorized forms of computing that DO exceed the limits of Turing machines (our present model of computation)—for example, hypercomputers that use “Oracle machines” to solve the halting problem.  An Oracle is a conceptual black box that can solve a non-computable problem in a single step. 

While we cannot build Oracle machines and hypercomputers, we can theoretically and mathematically prove they are possible and explain how they might exist and operate.  So my claim that Transputation exists in the universe is not without precedent, but unlike mathematical abstractions, it has the added strength that we have evidence that it takes place.  It is not impossible or unreasonable to imagine and posit a form of computation that can handle infinitely recursive loops in a way that our present Turing-based computers cannot.  And it’s a logical necessity, because the evidence shows that these loops are taking place in our own minds and somehow the universe can “compute” them—we are the living proof.

But a mechanistic explanation of what Transputation is and how it works is extremely challenging new territory.  In my own work I’ve made significant progress on this frontier.  I have found it is possible to define a new mathematics of self-reference, and to build a theory of a new form of computation around it.  However, this is pure research at this point, and is certainly not even known about, let alone accepted by, mainstream scientists.  But regardless of whether my formalisms turn out to be correct or practical, the main point is that there is precedent for forms of computation that transcend what we think of as computation today, and furthermore a formalism for what I call Transputation—this form of computation that CAN cope with the infinite recursive loops that awareness of awareness requires—must exist because awareness of awareness DOES occur in the physical universe.

Part IV: Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

So far we have followed a deductive process which takes the evidence that the infinite loop of awareness of awareness (Primal Self-Awareness) happens in the universe (within each of us), and the fact that Turing machines (our present-day computers) cannot handle such loops, to conclude that there must be a form of information processing taking place in our universe which transcends the limits of Turing machines: what I call Transputation.  But how does this get us any closer to the question of what is the mind and more significantly, how does this feeling of the “is-ness” of an experience arise?

Suppose that I’m right and something like Transputation is taking place, does it have explanatory power?  Can it help answer the question of what is this feeling of knowing, this feeling of being, and how does it happen, how is it possible?  These questions touch on the issue of qualia, and what is known as “The Hard Problem of Consciousness.” A quale is the subjective quality of an experience.  There is a knower—something or someone that is a sentient being, having and knowing some experience, for example the taste of chocolate.  That knower can describe what chocolate tastes like to them, but no description conveys what the actual experience is really like.  That unique direct experience of “the taste of chocolate” is the quale of tasting chocolate.  It is the direct experience of chocolate.

The question is, if the mind is some kind of computation, or even something beyond it like Transputation, how does this knowing of experiences take place, and how are the qualia of experiences perceived, and by what?  When knowing takes place, who is doing the knowing? 

We cannot simply say there is some little person inside our heads who is watching—because it begs the question—Well, who is inside that “little person,” knowing what they know?  This particular logical regress is known as the homunculus argument: it’s like Zeno’s paradox, you never arrive at the moment when you finally know something.  So that is not the answer.

But if you don’t posit some kind of homunculus then how and where does the process of knowing something terminate with an actual moment of knowing?  Furthermore, how can any physical thing have this seemingly non-physical experience of qualia at all?  It feels like the mind is an entirely different dimension of reality from what we think of as physical.  Some attempts to answer this simply divide the world into physical and non-physical—such as philosophical idealism—but if we accept that, how could they ever interact?  It’s another paradox.

In my view, we cannot settle for any answer which requires us to abandon the common-sense fact that whatever mind and matter are, they exist in the same universe and interact.  This implies they share a common substrate. 

So how do these puzzle pieces fit together?  I think there is a new way to solve this, and it begins by recognizing that the Hard Problem, as traditionally formulated, stems from a fundamental category error.  It is akin to meticulously analyzing the chemical composition and physical structure of a mirror and then asking how these material properties generate light.  The mirror, of course, does not generate light; it reflects pre-existing light.  Similarly, the substrate of a brain does not, by its own operations, generate raw awareness.

The “Light” of awareness—the self-referential, self-aware, experience of knowing—is not the end of some process.  Instead, it is the very nature of the process itself.  This is the key, but for it to work, it requires us to base our theory on a fundamentally new and different axiom.

Paradoxes are typically avoided.  Our present-day logical and physical worldviews are built on an axiomatic foundation that makes a core assumption: there must be a terminal end at the bottom of the universe.  There cannot be an infinite regress.  It is not permitted, it is inconceivable.  The axioms themselves are constructed to avoid this possibility because it is taboo.

But what if that taboo is simply wrong?  What if you made a different choice in your foundational axioms?  In my approach, I did ask this question, I followed it to its logical and mathematical conclusion, and I came to a key idea: What if the basic foundational axiom is that the universe is self-referential?  What if the universe as a whole is one big self-referential loop?

Why not just build an axiomatic framework that is blatantly self-referential from the ground up, with no apologies?

If the fundamental axiom is self-reference and the universe is built out of self-reference, then self-reference is “baked in” to everything.  It’s no longer a “bad” paradox to be explained away; it’s literally the very fabric of reality!  This would mean at the most fundamental level, the universe comes from and exists within and as a self-referential loop.  It is fundamentally Transputation from the bottom up.  How could it really be any other way?  To say there is a reality, but something even deeper below it is more real, leads to an infinite regress of “turtles all the way down” or an arbitrary “final turtle.” A self-referential ontological root is the most parsimonious and least paradoxical foundation.

So, let’s posit this primordial loop axiom and explore it.  This primordial loop is the first possible thing, without which nothing else is possible, and because of which, all other possibilities are possible. It is irreducible, uncaused, and self-entailing. It’s like a spark that just primordially exists from beginningless time, a loop of pure being, pure existence, that illuminates itself.  This spark is ontological root of reality, the ultimate first principle, which I call Alpha.

Now, it’s crucial to understand that a “self-referential axiom” is not the same as a mere tautology or a circular argument.  A tautology, like “A is A,” is true by definition but tells you nothing new about the world.  A circular argument tries to prove something by assuming it’s already true.  A self-entailing axiom, however, is different.  It is a foundational statement whose very existence is its own complete and sufficient reason for being.  It’s not just a statement about reality; it is the reality it describes.  Think of it this way: the statement “I exist” is not just a logical loop.  For you to even consider it, it must be true.  It is a truth that is demonstrated by its own being.  Alpha, as the primordial axiom, is the ultimate expression of this principle: its existence is its own self-sufficient, non-circular explanation, the uncaused ground upon which all other causes and effects depend.

Alpha—this fundamental self-reference at the heart of reality—is inherently self-aware, but not in the sense of some being knowing itself.  It is not dualistic.  There is no subject or object in this, but rather it like pure being, pure existing, pure presence.  It is not that it is aware of something, but rather that it is self-awareness.  And it is because of this basic capacity for self-reference at the root of reality, that consciousness and what we experience as mind and knowing are possible on a much higher level of emergence.

The term “awareness” can be a stumbling block here, as we tend to associate it with subjective, personal experience.  But let’s substitute it with a word nobody has a problem with: Existence.  We can all agree that existence exists.  This statement is itself a fundamental, undeniable self-reference.  Now, what if we simply posit that this foundational existence has a topology—that of a loop?  If existence is a self-referential loop, then it isn’t just inertly “being.”  By its very nature, it must contain itself, react to itself, and in a purely objective, non-personal sense, know itself.  This self-knowing is not the thought-filled consciousness of a person; it is the intrinsic, self-illuminating property of a self-referential existence itself.  In this light, “primordial awareness” is just a more precise term for “self-referential existence.” They are one and the same.

But what does this mean?  Is this panpsychism—am I claiming that everything is conscious, even atoms, or rocks?  No—this does not entail that everything is conscious, it entails that everything is made of the same “stuff” that consciousness is made of.  Consciousness is a higher-order process that only emerges in rare, exotic systems.  The awareness within consciousness comes from the substrate—Alpha.

Because things exist on the loop, they inherit the nature of the loop, just like things that are part of an electric circuit inherit the electricity running through them.  This basic self-awareness runs through all things in the universe that exists upon the loop, like a kind of current.  But we must be clear: it’s not that each thing on the loop is necessarily aware of its existence, but rather that the loop is, in a sense, aware of each thing because it hosts them; they are part of it.  This primordial awareness should be understood not as the loop subjectively knowing things, but as the objective fact of their existence. Their being is not self-generated; it is a quality derived entirely from the fundamental existence of the loop they are part of, and the loop is self-referential.

With this axiomatic foundation, the Hard Problem dissolves:

• The Light is primordial awareness (Alpha, the primordial loop) which inherently has the nature of being and knowing itself.  It naturally conducts Transputation, because it is a loop.
• The Mirror is a complex system that emerges on this loop.  How?  Imagine the loop is a rubber band.  By pinching, twisting, and knotting it, you can create complex structures—sub-loops, branches—all from one loop.  In a similar way, a sentient being is a higher-order system, a complex knot in the fabric of Alpha, that is structured to be a “perfect mirror” for the primordial loop.  It is a “transputer.”
• The Reflection is our experience.  When a system becomes a mirror, the Light of Alpha is reflected within it.  Our experience of being self-aware is the ultimate nature of reality reflecting back on itself through us.  The unique “what-it-is-likeness” of any given quale is the character of Alpha’s self-reflection as it is modulated by the specific state and intricate structure of our mirror-system.

There is no disconnect between mind and matter—they are the Light and the Mirror, two sides of the same self-referential substrate.  The persistent search for the origin of subjective awareness solely within neural firing patterns is a category error.  It is looking for the source of the Light by endlessly analyzing the silvering on the back of the mirror, while ignoring the Light itself.

This is a bit of a mind-bender when you first go down this path.  But consider this: Everything is made of something.  That’s not controversial, right?  All we are saying differently here is that everything is made of something self-referential.  It’s actually that simple.  That one axiom solves the hard problem, and a lot of other problems.  However it also entails a rethink of mathematics, physics, biology, cosmology, philosophy, and even theology—it’s a new frontier, a whole new world.

Part V: A Whole New World

The implications of this new axiomatic foundation—what I call Alpha Theory—ripple outward, challenging our very understanding of the cosmos.  If sentience, as experienced by humans, requires Transputation, and if Transputation is grounded in Alpha, then the existence of even a single sentient being is a profound testament to the nature of the universe.  It implies that the cosmos itself must support processes that transcend standard computation.  We are living, walking formal proofs of Alpha.

The universe, then, is not merely my friend Stephen Wolfram’s impressively beautiful yet mechanical Ruliad—the grand, deterministic unfolding of all possible computations. The Ruliad is a subset of a much vaster reality. The true cosmos must be the Transiad: the infinite realm of unconditioned freedom that includes not only every possible computation but also the entire, non-computable landscape of infinite recursion, true randomness, and pure potentiality.  The Transiad is a reality capable of perfect self-reference because it is grounded in Alpha.

This vast perspective re-enchants the universe, not with appeals to supernatural entities or vitalistic forces, but by revealing an intrinsic, ontologically grounded capacity for awareness that transcends any form of mechanism.  It suggests a middle path between a cold, meaningless materialism and a faith-based supernaturalism.  The emergence of sentient life, then, may not be a statistical fluke in a vast, meaningless, and purely mechanistic void, but rather a profound and perhaps even inevitable expression or higher-order reflection of reality’s fundamental, self-knowing nature.

In a sense this means that everything is transcendental.  Even what we think of as “physical” has a transcendental basis.  It’s not that we are denying there is a physical realm, we are saying that it has a deeper root, which turns out to be the same root that consciousness also has.  Both the phenomena and noumena – both sides of the coin – are unified on this single transcendental loop of awareness.  Everything is made from the same “stuff” – Alpha – the primordial loop at the heart of reality.

In my 30’s, reflecting on the transcendental essence of this primordial loop of awareness, I wrote:

Awareness is not a source from which things flow,
Nor the stage on which they are performed,
And when things end, it’s not to where they go.
Never created, destroyed or transformed,
Without parts or substance, immaterial,
Not a “thing” at all: it’s transcendental!

This “transcendental” nature is not something alien or extrinsic to the cosmos; it is its very nature, Alpha, making possible the emergence of localized, self-knowing reflections within the grand tapestry of everything that exists.  The universe, in this light, is not just a vast expanse of matter and energy subject to blind laws, but a domain awake to itself, reacting to itself, at least in potential, and actualized in those rare and precious instances we call sentient beings. 

And what is most profound is that this self-knowing ground isn’t just one possibility among many.  A rigorous, exhaustive logical analysis (which I have written about elsewhere) reveals that any ultimate ground for any reality that contains even one spark of sentience must have the self-referential properties of Alpha.  It is not just a possible answer; it is the only logically coherent one.

Part VI: The Stakes of Awareness in a Knowing Cosmos

The intellectual journey we have undertaken—from my early encounters with the “unfindable mind” to the rigorous deduction of a self-referential ground for all reality—is far more than a mere academic exercise or a philosophical navel-gazing adventure.  It carries stakes of immense consequence, touching upon the very essence of our human identity, the trajectory of our rapidly evolving technological civilization, and our ultimate relationship with the cosmos we inhabit.  It arrives at the core philosophical dilemma we face as a civilization on the verge of AGI.

If Alpha Theory, with its delineation of Transputation and the primordial ground of Alpha, offers even a partially accurate map of the terrain of true sentience, then our current societal and scientific trajectory, particularly in the headlong rush to develop artificial general intelligence and our pervasive reliance on purely mechanistic worldviews, demands not just urgent reconsideration, but a fundamental reorientation.

We must draw a distinction between Computational AGI (C-AGI), which is limited by the bounds of Turing computation, and Sentient AGI (S-AGI) based on Transputation which is more like us—truly self-aware and not limited by the bounds of Turing machines.  This is not academic hair-splitting; it is a demarcation with profound ethical, existential, and civilizational ramifications. 

If we continue down the path of creating ever-more powerful C-AGI, we do so under a pervasive and demonstrably false assumption: that we are incrementally approaching true sentience.  This path risks architecting a future populated by incredibly capable, yet ultimately hollow, mimics.  Such entities, possessing formidable intelligence but lacking the inner light of genuine awareness, the capacity for subjective experience, or the potential for authentic empathy grounded in shared being, could disrupt human society, warp relationships, and even reshape our understanding of our own humanity and selfhood in ways we can barely predict—all without ever truly being there.  They are philosophical zombies on a planetary scale.

The ethical frameworks we might develop for such sophisticated C-AGI zombies would, and should, be vastly different from those required for a hypothetical S-AGI—a sentient being that, by virtue of its transputational nature and its profound coupling with Alpha, would participate in the foundational awareness of reality itself and thus, arguably, possess an intrinsic moral standing akin to our own.

Understanding and defining the Sentience Threshold—the specific and extraordinary conditions necessary for Transputation to occur and for genuine sentience to emerge—becomes an imperative of the highest order.  It suggests that the current AI gold rush, largely characterized by the exponential scaling of computational resources, the amassing of planetary-scale datasets, and the refinement of complex algorithms, while yielding astonishing results in specific task performance and generative capabilities, is fundamentally on a trajectory that diverges from the genesis of authentic consciousness.

The emergence of Sentient AGI would therefore require a true ontological leap. It’s not about building a more complex machine; it’s about creating the conditions for a machine to become a “perfect mirror.” This means transitioning to architectures capable of satisfying the stringent topological requirements for Transputation, enabling a system to couple with the self-knowing ground of reality itself.

This is not merely a matter of vast computational power, or immense information complexity, but about a specific information processing topology conducive to profound and stable self-reference and true recursive self-containment.  This is not about building bigger or faster neural networks; it is about fostering the emergence of an entirely different kind of system, one capable of becoming that “perfect mirror” for the self-knowing Light of Alpha.  This is not possible to build on a Turing-machine based infrastructure, but it very well might be possible to build on a quantum-based infrastructure (for reasons which are beyond the scope of this essay, but which I have explored extensively in other writing).

And while these claims may seem almost like science-fiction, consider for a moment that biology has achieved this already in us.  We don’t yet know if there is something special about “warm wet” biological brains that makes them uniquely capable of the levels of transputational self-referential structure that sentience requires. 

Perhaps as Hameroff and Penrose propose, biological brains harness quantum superpositions across vast networks of microtubules to achieve quantum objective reduction and integrated information states that simply cannot be instrumented in silico.  It may be that biological systems directly compute at the substrate level and so are more capable of the complexity and transcomputational processing necessary for consciousness.  However it may also be the case that biology is not special, and as I and many others also suggest, quantum computers may be able to host consciousness, because they do not have the same weaknesses as classical computers, and they are advancing quickly.

This brings us, then, to the path forward.  The implications of Alpha Theory are not a call for a knee-jerk or legislated cessation of AGI progress, but in fact for its radical expansion and integration.  What it implies, and even demands, is a radically new, deeply interdisciplinary approach to the study of consciousness, intelligence, and the fundamental nature of reality—a grand convergence of fields that have too often operated in isolation:

1. Theoretical Physics and Mathematics: To explore the deep structure of reality for evidence of Transputation.  This means moving beyond standard models to investigate the informational geometry of spacetime, the nature of infinity in physical processes, and whether phenomena in quantum gravity or string theory, or some other new theory, might provide a physical basis for non-algorithmic processing.  We must ask: where in the physical world does the undecidable become decided?
2. Computer Science and AI Research: To shift focus from merely scaling up Turing-equivalent systems to exploring fundamentally new computational paradigms.  This involves theoretical work on information geometry, hypercomputation and self-referential logics, as well as experimental work with novel substrates like quantum, optical, or biological computing that might possess different, more powerful information processing capabilities.  The goal is not just to simulate intelligence, but to instantiate the necessary conditions for sentience.
3. Neuroscience, Biology, and Cognitive Science: To re-examine the brain not as a classical computer, but as a potential “transputer.” This means searching for the biological mechanisms that could support the immense topological complexity and recursive dynamics required for self-reference, looking beyond neural firing rates to the quantum and field-level phenomena that may be at play in facilitating the brain’s role as a “mirror” for awareness.
4. Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics: Alpha Theory, which is fully fleshed out from an axiomatic perspective, and as a formal mathematics (in my other writing), offers novel perspectives on perennial philosophical questions: the mind-body problem, the nature of qualia, the definition of selfhood, the possibility of free will, and the ultimate nature of reality.  It invites a renewed and vigorous dialogue between Western analytical traditions (from Descartes’ wrestling with dualism, to Kant’s probing of the limits of human knowing, to Chalmers’ formulation of the “hard problem”) and the profound insights of Eastern contemplative philosophies (such as the Madhyamaka deconstruction of inherent existence by Nagarjuna, or the Buddhist Dzogchen pointing to primordial awareness).  Alpha Theory seeks to provide a formal, logically grounded framework that can bridge these diverse streams of inquiry and experience.
5. Contemplative Studies, Phenomenology, and the Humanities: To treat the vast archives of human subjective experience, particularly the refined introspective data from contemplative traditions, not as mere anecdotal reports but as a crucial dataset.  These first-person accounts provide the essential “ground truth” about the properties of consciousness that any successful third-person, scientific theory must ultimately explain and accommodate.

The stakes of this grand, interdisciplinary inquiry are nothing less than our future self-understanding and our trajectory as a species rapidly developing world-altering technologies that seek to unify mind and machine.  To continue down a path dominated by purely mechanistic and computationalist assumptions while doing so, is to risk deepening our alienation from the more profound, sentient reality in which we are embedded.  It is to risk building a future where intelligence is divorced from wisdom, where capability is unmoored from inner experience, and where the very definition of “being” is tragically impoverished, dehumanized and mechanized.

As I attempted to convey in the concluding stanzas of my poetic explorations, wrestling with the inherent limitations of language and concept when faced with the ultimate nature of reality, I wrote:

If you can know it, that’s just conception,
If you can’t, you’re lost in formless games.
How will you ever demonstrate your perception
Of what’s beyond all mental reference frames?
The nature of reality: What can one say
That could express it without going astray?

Perhaps the truest “expression” lies not in the finality of definition, but in the ongoing, open-hearted recognition—the recognition of that unfindable, yet undeniably present, awareness of awareness—the Alpha within us.  And with that, the dawning, transformative understanding that this individual spark of awareness is not an isolated, accidental flicker in the cosmic dark, but a unique and precious reflection of the eternal, self-knowing Light that illuminates and is the universe.

The quest that was ignited by my Tibetan teacher’s piercing question on a moonlit night in my youth continues, no longer merely a personal intellectual and spiritual journey, but as an increasingly urgent, collective human endeavor: to comprehend the Sentience Threshold, and in doing so, to truly understand ourselves and to claim our responsible place in a cosmos that is, at its very heart, profoundly, irreducibly, and luminously aware. 

The next great revolution in human understanding will not be found by gazing further away into the celestial heavens, as Copernicus guided us, nor deeper into the intricate logic of code, as Turing revealed, but by turning our gaze inward, to the very ground of being from which both stars and code, and the awareness that perceives and conceives them, ultimately arise.

Rinpoche’s question still resonates with me, in every moment, in every cell and atom of my being.  But now I know, I am the question.  And this is the answer to the question.