Thank you for the reply, very interesting, and I am delighted by your willingness to really properly step outside all the conventional boxes. I'm right with you, and will share one of my own concepts, but I want to clear something up first:

You hold, though, that we could never build such a thing because it is too complex.

Actually, I think we'll succeed, albeit not at creating human consciousness, for which I'm perfectly glad, because there are already enough of us, and we're not very reliable thinkers. I think it will be an inevitable outcome of creating properly recursively self-modeling machines. We're a ways off, I think a lot more than 5 years, but we're making good progress. I think the biggest issue is the degree of sophistication needs to be sufficient that we can recognize machine awareness in spite of it being very different than our own (I'm assuming it will be very different than ours, at least at first).

We could argue that even very simple systems are effectively self aware by way of feedback, but that's not really what we mean by aware, we have animalistic expectations for what conscious "seems" like, indeed biased towards talking monkeys like us. At a minimum we seem to expect something to have a solid mental model of its environment, others and self, all of which can be used to flexibly predict and guide conduct. We're getting better as the years march on, admitting now that many other animals are conscious in a meaningful way, even though they don't speak English, but it's hard to say how well computers will fare in that judging contest when they have no cuddly emotions, and the environments they perceive and model are virtual and have very different dimensions. In some ways, we might almost be better off to deliberately frame the problem as simulating animals, rather than creating consciousness, because then we would be more honest and clear with our expectations, and recognize that non-animal consciousness won't need to behave like animals. On this line of thinking, I think we might already have systems that are effectively a little bit conscious, albeit in ways that we humans can't really relate to, and don't really care about or respect, in no small part because we think we're so fucking special, and not just lowly machines. We have feelings dammit, we're not just some adaptive network monitoring system!

I think the hardest part will be realizing how much training really goes into our brains, reaching right down to the level of the wiring that makes them work. Like I said before, we'll have a hard time, at least with efficiency, because our hardware can't quite pull that trick to the same fundamental levels of wiring that neurons do. Gotta love neuroplasticity, nature builds fine machines.

When I say a god mechanism, what I mean is that something external to a neural network such as ours may be influencing it, and further, that may be a requirement for awareness as we are defining it.

I think we'll come to realize that nature is more than enough to explain what we see, but who knows?

Given that there might be 11 dimensions, we have no idea how gravity works, and or best models of physics only account for 5% of the mass of the universe, ... <snip> ... I believe that it is entirely possible something external could act on our brains. It could be that the universe, or dark matter, is one big neural network, a cosmic consciousness of sorts, that is growing up with the rest of us.

Damn, you're one of the only other people I've ever heard say that, it's almost word for word like stuff I've written on numerous other occasions. I could dig back through a few thousand reddit posts and find something, but take my word, I've made that exact kind of argument numerous times in other contexts, often discussing causality and physicality in general.

Here's my version: We don't look at the visible universe and assume that we are dead center of the entire universe, we assume there should be more universe(s?) beyond what we can see. We should, on principle, have the same assumption with respect to scale, and not assume that the smallest stuff we happen to be able to detect from our scale is actually the absolute fundamental bottom scale, where all physics bottoms out in absolute laws of nature that determine everything. Indeed I would suggest it's almost a laughable expectation. I like to entertain that there could be untold levels of scale below what we consider "fundamental" particles, and that the "fundamental" laws of our physics may be no more fundamental than the laws of building with Lego blocks (not cutting or melting them). I'll call the scales below our "fundamental" particles "subspace", with no intention of referencing sci-fi.

I will now proceed with some loose analogies from our scale, to illustrate things that could conceivably happen in subspace scales. First, note how different frequencies of light and/or radio waves don't interfere with each other. Next, imagine that space and time are products of our kind of matter, but not all kinds of matter. Now, imagine that our matter is a particular "frequency spectrum" of "waves" in subspace, but that there are other entire spectra of waves in subspace, that don't interfere or interact with the waves that compose our frequencies of matter. You would have entirely different classes of matter, that may not even obey time and space in the way our matter does. But perhaps there could be different subspace frequencies that do interact with ours, and might intersect our time and space in ways that would seem completely impossible or absurd to us.

This could all easily be the case, and we could be completely ignorant of it. Our physics works, with the only commonly claimed exceptions looking rather suspiciously like our own perceptual failings. But any exceptions could be quite literally inexplicable in terms of anything we know as physics, with no physical residues or fields or anything else that can be measured or detected. Just seemingly violated physics. And then again, given that we have not fully reduced many macro-physical systems to "fundamental" physics, we only assume that the macro-physical is fully explicable by the underlying physics. We don't fully know that, and for all we do know, systems at various scales could have multiple "resonances", effectively a partial existence outside our usual physical presence, that need not obey or interact according to physics as we normally detect it. Imagine a kind of spaceless, timeless effect where similar objects, by virtue of their similar extra-physical resonance patterns, manage to influence each other, even if to a very small degree. There is your "one big neural network, a cosmic consciousness of sorts", based on there being an effective influencing shared resonance between minds (due to their similarity), but that is not of our matter, and thus does not obey space and time as our matter does.

The argument we could use to rule this out is that science paints a complete explanation of all demonstrable phenomena. But we actually don't know that, we only assume it, no matter how sound that assumption may seem.

Cheers, thanks again for the interesting chat, I didn't expect it to go here, but it's fun :)