The features we experience such as phenomenal light, phenomenal color, phenomenal shapes, and phenomenal sounds, even phenomenal time!, only exist as attributes of our own world simulation, which also would explain the famous philosophical dilemma of “If a tree falls in a forest” —”If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?”—. We can argue that sound (just as we experience it) only can subsist inside our world simulation.

Within our minds. Phenomenal sound and physical sound, or, the representation and the thing represented are too different in nature in the end. As you may know, we can agree with others because we’re representing the same stuff, not perfectly, obviously, but with enough accuracy to function, so the fact that all of us have our own private world representations makes it easy for us to organize.

As Andrés had written throughout the website of qualia-computing, our world simulation encompasses more than we think it does. Some people may think that are just some colors, and bodily sensations, but it is quite everything, all we experience and know is part of the representation. It envelops above all our model of how things work, how we conceive our bodies, our minds, the entire planet, nations, and societies we’re aware of, the passing of time, historic events, and our expectations about the future of humanity. It also includes the inner layers of this planet, outer space, and whole galaxies.

In other words, our model of the world includes both sensory percepts, and the ideas/meaning associated with them. Even more subtle details are enveloped by our world simulation, stuff which we have not even an explicit internal representation of, perhaps we experience them usually, so we’re aware of, but we don’t pay enough attention to it in order to incentivize ourselves to think on it, therefore it doesn’t form part of our conceptual scheme, thus we can’t talk about it with others because we don’t have any kind of reference.

One example of it is something known as a-modal percepts, introduced by Steven Lehar, and are basically the parts of our visual field that are not explicitly visible, because in some cases something is occluding them, but we still including the missing part of those occluded objects, we’re aware about the rest of the object without seeing it directly, so we can have a complete volumetric representation of the environment that integrate implicit information.

With all of these understood, we’ll notice how the contents of our phenomenology (world simulation) have a lot of layers. In the most wholehearted levels of it, there’s also a kind of impersonal force that rules our world simulation, and it’s smart, because it basically embodies the general intelligence of our entire world simulation. It's not our ego, it is nor the sensory avatar we use to identify with; our egos can be thought of as a mere mask of this force. Some people usually name it as “the subconscious mind”, “the true self”, or “superego”, Andrés calls it as “the meta-self programmer”, and in simple terms, refers to the dynamics of emotional gradients which determines what is important and what is not, within our experience. It is present in every single human, and is kind of the predetermined authority that guides our world simulation.

Evolution put it there as the main administrator of our world simulation, if you want to see it like that. It also knows more than you explicitly think, but don’t be afraid, its unique purpose is basically to make sense of all what’s happening, and ensure your safety in the end. On some exotic occasions, such as near death experiences, or exotic states of consciousness, it can manifest itself as a little chat with “God”. But that’s another topic that I won’t dive into, I leave it to your discretion.

–Briefly annotation: “The mysteries of the meta-internal representation layer”: I mentioned once that the meta-internal representation layer of our minds, which produces stuff such as mental images, and it can be described as a weird imitation, or unrestricted photo-realistic simulation of the sensorial “external”-world… Visual qualia, auditive qualia, scent, and flavor qualia can present themselves in our imagination or memory, but in a quite phantasmagoric phenomenal character; they merely feel less real than real if you want to put it that way.

The amount of qualia is much lower in that layer. Same as ordinary dreams, they feel like the “echo” of the real world, right? As an example, when someone intoxicates himself with psychedelics, what he’s doing is basically energizing his world simulation, therefore the amount of consciousness seems drastically increased, and I would say that indeed the meta-internal representation layer is the one that gets more affected by this. It literally becomes stronger, giving place to incredible phenomena such as highly vivid internal hallucinations manifested in a huge variety of qualia, even exotic qualia, which in this kind of conditions can be experienced as real as we experience stuff in consensual reality.

So, my point here is that there has to be a defined region in the brain responsible for this, that can use multiple modalities of qualia without directly appealing to the visual cortex, and the other regions we think are forcibly linked with certain types of qualia. Otherwise, there should be an internal meta-representation generator for each of the sensory cortex regions.

Depiction of the main layers that make up our world simulation. The girl of green skin, and blond hair, exemplifies and illustrates a well-known archetype attributed to qualities such as fertility, life, and the love for natural environments, which commonly is represented through an entity that receives the name of “mother nature” —Subagent—.
Author: Aarón T. M.