Why I built consciousness.social — a web app designed to make human society self-aware
How it all began
About 15 years ago, I emigrated from Romania to the USA. I don’t remember if I ever wondered about what consciousness was before then — probably as much as any curious teen — but once I moved, I found myself without my friends around, and with a lot of time on my hands, while I waited for a mix up with my immigration papers to be sorted.
So, I started writing profusely. I wrote about all sorts of things — myself, short stories, longer stories. And I wrote about consciousness. The immigration paper mix-up got sorted in the end, but really, I didn’t stop writing about consciousness, not for another 10–15 years. And I didn’t stop reading about it either. In fact, for at least half a decade, the topic of consciousness would come to consume most of my time and energy — from morning ‘till evening. And as I was absorbing all of the knowledge that I could about the topic, I was also piercing together my view on what consciousness was.
The first major work that I wrote on the subject — and my first ever book — was In Principio Res. The title was as pompous as my early 20s self could make it — but it’s just Latin (well it’s never “just” Latin, is it?) for “In the beginning of things”. Because it was my initial attempt at putting my ideas into words. The book was not just about consciousness — it was about a lot of things, the most important ideas that I had at the time. Naturally, I self-published, for who in their right mind would publish such a book?
Later on, I went to study psychology and neuroscience at Royal Holloway near London, with an aim towards continuing on with neuroscience. Whilst I was there, I wrote the paper on consciousness that would eventually be incorporated into consciousness.social. I also got some good support from the professors that I shared it with, which helped refine it further.
At the same time, I developed more and more love for computer science — and got into computational neuroscience and machine learning, among other subjects. When my undergrad came to an end, I was torn between continuing to study neuroscience or computer science. I even applied for a PhD in neuroscience of consciousness at the The Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, but did not get accepted. I did however got to correspond with Anil Seth and shared the manuscript for my paper on consciousness with him, and honestly even getting a reply from him was an honour, never mind the fact that he also provided some amazing feedback.
So I ended up taking a Msc in Computer Science at UCL, which was a fantastic experience. And while I was there, I could see the power of being able to express yourself in code, and I started thinking about what it would mean to build platforms that people could use to understand ideas.
After my Masters, one of my first big platform projects was multizoa.com. By that time I had written a few more books that attempted to simplify what in Principio Res first spoke about. One of them was Understanding Our Whole, which introduced multizoa theory — the biological theory of human society. I had also written a paper on the subject — Is Human Society an Organism Made of Many Animals? So I decided to build an website that would host both the book and the paper.
One of the primary reasons why I decided to build multizoa.com was that I knew that without it, I couldn’t talk about my theory of consciousness, since the popularity theory of consciousness has multizoa theory as a foundation.
Once multizoa.com was done, I began working as a software engineer for a social media platform, where I perfected (and continue to) my skills that would eventually allow me to build complex web applications, partly by spearheading the company’s AI initiatives.
And one sunny morning, while sitting in a bright London park, after a particularly amazing disco party, I had an idea on how to showcase the theory of consciousness that I had worked on for all these years: A web application as an art installation. One that would incorporate AI, one that would attempt to be the voice of human society. consciousness.social was born.
And now, after 6 months and 15000 lines of code, consciousness.social is done in its v0. There’s still a lot of work to be done to add important features, but I found this to be a good starting point for sharing my work with the world. Especially since I’ve come to value the idea of getting feedback early on in a project, to validate its use.
Now, I am looking for brave souls that would like to test the platform out and give feedback.
What effect does elicit in a user that has never come across the platform before? Is it thought-provoking, boring, too complex? Anyone who would like to participate is welcome to jump on the website and test it out.
What is consciousness.social?
Essentially, it is a Twitter-like (ahem, X-like) platform where you can post only in society’s name. To do this, you use the 4th person singular — a pronoun designed for human society. For example, when you write “Y am hungry”, you mean that the worldwide human society is hungry. You speak in the name of all people, everywhere. The platform does its best to explain how to use the 4th person singular, and as you use it, you unlock more and more features, including the paper “Is consciousness popularity?” that explains the popularity theory of consciousness, which forms the conceptual basis for consciousness.social.
Why visit consciousness.social?
The cool thing about the platform is that, based on the popularity theory of consciousness, by visiting it and coming in contact with the ideas the platform presents, you are helping making human society self-aware.
Imagine a caveman who starts discovering his identify, and starts realizing that she is a person that has a self, and starts developing the language to express that — the I. How revolutionary would that experience have been for that person? Based on the popularity theory of consciousness, this is what the Y can do for human society. If the 4th personal singular becomes as popular as, say, Gangham Style, then it would effectively mean that human society will start to become self-aware, and can start asking questions like “Who am Y?”, “What do Y want?”, and “Do Y really love videos of cats floating within my conscious awareness?”
The only thing that you have to do to help the platform achieve its goal is to visit its webpage. You may or may not wish to interact with the content, but that is only secondary. What’s most important is that the ideas that consciousness.social is based on get disseminated, because the more they do, the more human society will become self-aware. And that has the potential to be as transformative for our society as the development of individual self-awareness was for humanity.
So help make human society self-aware by visiting consciousness.social. I am continuing to add features to the platform, and your feedback will hold great weight in what those features will be.
