Chapter 7
The Awarepath: Your Conscious Lifetime
Imagine you could rewind the movie of your life. Not the external events, not the home videos or the photographs, but the inner movie. Every sight, every sound, every taste, every flash of emotion, every half-formed thought, every dream you forgot by morning, all of it, from the very first flicker of awareness you ever had to the last moment of consciousness you will ever experience. Played back in order, in full, with nothing left out.
That is your awarepath.
What Is an Awarepath?
To get a feel for what an awarepath actually contains, slow the movie down. Pick a single moment, say, right now. What is in your awareness at this very instant?
There is the visual field: these words on a page or screen, the peripheral blur of whatever surrounds them, the color of the light in the room. Sound reaches you: maybe traffic outside, maybe music, maybe the hum of silence itself. You feel your body — the pressure of a seat against your back, the weight of your arms, the temperature of the air on your skin. A taste lingers in your mouth, or the absence of one. A smell you have probably stopped noticing hangs in the air.
Now multiply that by every waking second of your life. Every moment of childhood wonder and teenage angst and adult routine. Every dream. Every daydream. The dull moments and the vivid ones, the ones you remember and the countless millions you have forgotten. Strung together, in the order you lived them, they form one continuous thread — your awarepath.
But Ixperiencit Theory shows that this view is far too narrow. If identical brain structure and functioning produces identical consciousness, then your awarepath potentially extends to every instance in the universe where a brain structured and functioning like yours produces conscious experience. Your conscious life is not one line; it is a vast branching tree, with each branch representing a different physical body that produces the same conscious experience you would have.
The Layers Beneath: Physical Path and Neural Path
The awarepath, your inner movie, does not appear out of nowhere. It is produced by a physical system: your brain, housed in your body. To understand how conscious experience relates to the physical world, it helps to name these underlying layers.
Your body traces its own path through time. From conception to death, every atom in your body occupies a specific position at each moment, every chemical reaction proceeds along a particular course, every cell divides or dies on a particular schedule. This complete physical journey — the trajectory of your entire body through the space of possible physical states — is your physical path (formally, physapath in the full theoretical framework).
The physical path includes the neural path, and the neural path determines the awarepath. But, and this is crucial, the relationship is not one-to-one.
Nested within the physical path is a more specific trajectory: that of your brain. The organization and activity of your brain over time — every neural connection, every firing pattern, every surge of neurotransmitter, constitutes your neural path (formally, neuropath). The neural path is the part of the physical path that directly produces consciousness.
The Overdetermination of Consciousness
Here is the chapter's central insight, and it is worth dwelling on.
Right now, as you read this sentence, a cosmic ray could strike a single atom in your liver and knock it out of position. Would your conscious experience change? Not by one iota. A bacterium in your gut could divide or not divide. Your blood sugar could be 95 mg/dL instead of 97. A skin cell on your left shin could be at a slightly different stage of its lifecycle. A capillary in your right foot could be carrying one more red blood cell or one fewer. None of these differences would change your awareness by even the faintest shade.
And it goes further. Even at the level of the brain, there is some degree of overdetermination. As we saw in the neuroscience chapter, neurons are noisy, synaptic transmission is probabilistic, and the brain's macro-level patterns are robust against minor variations in individual neural behavior. Not every microscopic difference in brain state produces a different conscious experience.
So your conscious identity, your awarepath, is not one thing. It is a class of things. It is the class of all physical arrangements that produce your conscious experience.
Branches and Possibilities
At every moment of your life, your future awarepath could branch in many different directions. If you turn left at the next intersection, you will have one sequence of experiences; turn right, and you will have a different sequence. Should a car run a red light at that intersection, your experiences will be different again.
But here is a subtlety that most people miss: many of these branches produce identical conscious experiences, at least for a while. Whether the air molecules to your left shift slightly one way or another makes no difference to what you experience. Whether a particular bacterium in your gut divides or not makes no difference to your consciousness. There are countless physical variations that have zero impact on your awarepath.
This means that from any given conscious moment, the space of possible future awarepaths fans out enormously — but many of those awarepaths are identical to each other. Your consciousness is overdetermined by physics: there are far more physical paths that produce your experience than there are distinct experiences.
And this overdetermination is what makes superimmortality possible. Because if your awarepath can be produced by a vast number of different physical paths, then even if one particular physical path ends — your body dies — there are, in principle, other physical paths that could produce the same continuation of your awarepath. The inner movie does not have to end just because one projector breaks down, if another projector somewhere is running the same film.
Key Terms in This Chapter
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The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.