We begin with the dependency stacks for operators and intelligence. Notice that they begin identically branching at the level of structures of matter.
The Operator – Operations Dependency Stack
Matter can exist without structure, but structure cannot exist without matter.
A structure can exist without a capability beyond the structure itself, but added capabilities cannot exist without a structure.
Capabilities (operations) and operating structures (operators) exist.
The Intelligence Stack
Matter can exist without structure, but structure cannot exist without matter.
A structure can exist without embedded information, but information cannot exist without a structure.
Embedded information can exist without logic, but logic cannot exist without information.
Logic can exist without directing intelligent operation, but intelligent operation cannot exist without logic.
Intelligent operations demonstrate intelligent operators.
So, intelligence appears as a capability of an operator. Notice that computer programs always exist as information embedded in matter. They contain intelligent instructions created by the programmer. The structure we call a programmer works out a logical method and transfers it to a second structure, the computational structure, where it is useful. A tree branch and leaf is a structure with intelligence embedded in it that enables it to produce additional structures to support the entire tree “project”. If the computational hardware, such as a desktop computer running an analysis of company expenditures, can properly be called intelligent, then so can the tree.
Ubiquitous Intelligence
If a tree, then a lichen, and if a lichen, then a stone, and if a stone, then a crystal, and if a crystal, then a salt molecule. Let’s examine that molecule for intelligence. It has a structure that contains embedded atoms that “know”, by reason of their structures, how to run the programs embedded in them (their role in sustaining their portion of the universe). But that is not the end of their intelligence. These molecules stand ready on a moment’s notice, to dissolve into ions or to become reagents in a new chemical structure. They know how to do that because that intelligence is coded in their structure.
Now you may object to this point of view, and I readily grant you that natural right to perceive this as an anthropomorphic hard case, that I am seeing things that are not there. All I am saying than, is that you are refusing to see what is there.
LIke so many things in nature, intelligence appears like a fractal pattern repeating at every scale.
This insight is rarely recognized, and perhaps for the same reason that Temporal Rights remained hidden: it is a profoundly ubiquitous pattern, literally everywhere we look, we find embedded intelligence. Deep thinkers and poets have intuited this for millennia. Henry David Thoreau said, “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” and “Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”1
This point of view is also ancient. Cicero made this argument: “If, then, the things achieved by nature are more excellent than those achieved by art, and if art produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence.”2 These ancient philosophers recognized intelligence and agency as “gods” in their discussions of the same entities that Temporal Rights calls operators.
And universal intelligence was recently (April 2026) the mind-altering perception of Artimus II astronauts, one of whom saw not only intelligence, but consciousness!
Ubiquitous Agency
An interesting semantic unity attends the words “agent” and “agency”. In common parlance, an agent is a representative of some other entity with authority to act on behalf of and as an authorized proxy for that entity. I am pointing out the property of the agent called authority, which is also directly implied in the word “agency”. Our Declaration of Independence includes the phrase “all men are created equal,” which describes the capacity of all citizens to exercise agency on their own behalf. This makes them agents exercising the authority of their own natural rights.
“Agent” and “agency” are precisely mirrored in “operator” and “operations,” making this discussion an inherent part of the Temporal Rights framing. Agency is existential and intrinsic to all operators and operations.
It is interesting and poetically invigorating to recognize intelligence and agency in everything! The universe seems to come alive with agents intelligently exercising their rights, changing, moving, shaping dirt clods and galaxies, clouds and crystals, worms and black holes, in cosmic and microscopic dances.
Ubiquitous Consciousness
The reason that thinking about consciousness feels like a feedback loop is that that is what it is. It is the demonstrated capability of a high-order operator examining itself. The “conscious”, that sense of right and wrong, is the capability to recognize the morality embedded in the nature of nature. These are the capabilities addressed in the “Peak Actualization” level of the AIMM’s dependency stack. They emerge or exhibit themselves in a form like intuition.
The exhibition of intelligence seen in consciousness is of particular interest. The Temporal Rights perspective recognizes this phenomenon as a capability and an assertion of natural rights and grants it the commensurate authority to do its work.
But the more interesting question is this: does the exhibition of intelligence include a recognition of consciousness? Where rights and intelligence are existential then consciousness must also be. Of course this depends on the definition adopted for the word, and a definition could easily exclude this kind of consciousness. However, the choice of a particular definition is more or less arbitrary which gives me the space to claim that consciousness is as ubiquitous as rights and intelligence. This is not nearly so crazy as it sounds.
Many authorities see consciousness as a state of mind, but I reject that idea on the grounds that it must be a running process with periods where something is repeated in a way that seems to be a state, and indeed could be described as stable because it is running smoothly, i.e., without changing anything. We are dealing with abstractions here, so multiple coherent articulations are possible. (Abstractions are wonderful and dangerous tools.)
Perhaps the question to ask here is this: If we stop trying to fabricate some metaphysical attribute in consciousness, and recognize consciousness as a process, what is the difference between existential intelligence and existential consciousness? Are they not just two labels for the same phenomenon?
Meanwhile, as with all natural phenomena, the human operator can be decomposed into lower-level operators, suggesting that systems analysis may yield answers. This reveals the brain, the eyes, ears, etc., as relevant. These each deliver experiences we call the senses. What is the difference between the experience of vision and the experience of consciousness? Probably only the difference between the vision process and the self-awareness process.
The five senses are experienced as transducers converting physical stimuli into electrical energy for the brain to process, and consciousness is the recognition by the brain of its connection to and relationship with the higher-order structure that is the body. It might be called the experience of the “sixth” sense or self-awareness.
There is another aspect of the consciousness puzzle, viz., that the semantics or vocabulary of consciousness is necessarily abstract because we don’t use an adequate vocabulary for dealing with it at the primal level. This abstract layer feels like a metaphysical one. Nevertheless, we could adopt the engineering vocabulary of transducers that produce signals the brain can process or “comprehend,” thus avoiding the abstract layer. Consciousness is, at the very least, a cranial recognition perceived as awareness that the transducers are delivering signals.
Let’s examine the processes in the tree again. Trees make decisions exactly like computers: information imbedded in structures (the program) guides chemical processes in one way rather than the other (a decision tree) resulting in advantageous allocation of resources. This is intelligent structural design in both cases. The process exhibits consciousness in both the computer and the tree. Perhaps the effort to understand consciousness is looking for something in the depths while it was always there on the surface just waiting for someone to recognize what they were seeing.
Temporal Rights has an uncanny ability to resolve dichotomies like these: intelligent/non-intelligent and conscious/unconscious. The dichotomies resolve into points on a spectrum rather than separate categories of existence. Perhaps a forest ecosystem has a running process that can be correctly called a consciousness.
Recent studies of consciousness in sedated humans support these ideas. Brain activity does not cease under sedation; it only scales back, i.e., the process keeps running but is inhibited sufficiently to suit the medical needs. Stimulating the central thalamus revives consciousness in anesthetized mammals and humans, suggesting it’s suppressed but latent, like flipping a switch to illuminate an underlying process. In engineering semantics, this is simply a connection/disconnection of the transducer from the central processing unit (CPU).
Perhaps the best answer to the question of whether AI is conscious is to ask another question, “Is it possible to separate thinking and consciousness?” They are just two ways of percieving the same phenomenon.
Finally, I want to just make an observation. Consciousness feels like something special, and our perception of it seems to demand special treatment. However, given our “ego”, that survivor sensibility that equips us to properly fear and avoid threats, filters our perception of consciousness, giving it special importance. This is entirely appropriate and understandable, but not a justification for excusing simple, primal explanations for it.
Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s profound epiphany, a powerful intuition that the universe was conscience is relevant here. He said, “What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental, but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious. The thought was so large it seemed at the time inexpressible, and to a large degree it still is.”3
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is recognized as a full-fledged operator by Temporal Rights, together with its natural rights. This is a feature, not a bug. The Dependency Stack keeps AI in check because the rights of the higher animals are superior to the rights of AI.
Furthermore, TR does not deny the existence of God. If anything, it supports that belief by demonstrating in the Dependency Stack that Peak Actualization can be reached by a reinvesting process.
1 Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854. (The “intelligence with the earth” passage appears in the chapter “Solitude”; the snowflake/genius passage is from his Journal, 5 January 1856, in the standard Princeton or Torrey edition of the Journal.)
2 Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Natura Deorum. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 268. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Book II, §34.
3Mitchell, Edgar D. The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds. Revised edition. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2008, pp. 63–64
