Cognitive Operations in the First Person Perspective. Part 1: The 1 st Person Laboratory.

A long tradition of authors has suggested that consciousness is incorporated in a processing loop that connects mental sensations with physical causes. This paper assumes the cognitive loop hypothesis and is divided into two parts. The first part introduces the 1 st Person Laboratory as an environment that can be used to identify and examine such loops by analyzing cognitive operations that are performed and experienced in the 1 st Person perspective. We will show that the physical cause of sensations is a model of physical reality not to be confused with physical reality itself. By carefully documenting the activities performed by a 1 st person when interacting with his own model we will define the functions required to identify sensations as real tangible objects inside the 1 st Person Laboratory and establish the everyday feeling of reality we use to run our lives. Second we will then use the architecture of these functions as the blue print for the construction of a robot designed to identify tangible objects outside the 1 st Person Laboratory. This will automate the symbolic instructions defining our processing loops by implementing their processing functions with independent physical systems. When treated as symbols, the meaning of these systems will then be available as observable visualizations of our true reality belief. Because they are also objects these same symbols implement the physical interactions that process our experiences around the cognitive cycle. This exercise will show that a robot, like any physical system, is conscious of some primitive experiences defined by the loop from which it is built. Whether such a robot will have human experiences, will depend upon whether its stable loop configurations contain processing paths that resemble our own evolution. With this paper we hope to convince the reader that he/she is a processing loop containing observable experiences, including the sensations defining his/her body, in the display phase of the process. Furthermore, the architecture of operations we, 1 st Person beings, perform when conscious of real objects is offered as a framework for a comprehensive knowledge processing theory from which quantum and in turn classic physics that can be derived as approximations. The development of such a theory will give new tools to both physicists and the bio-chemical scientists dealing with aggregates of physical entities by providing direct access to forms of action from which conscious machinery is built at macroscopic scales.