Comment by f_of_t_
I like how you framed that — the “summary of oneself” idea aligns with how awareness might be less about computation and more about internal coherence. Binary systems simulate state transitions, but awareness seems to emerge from continuous integration — not between 0 and 1, but in the gradient between them.
Maybe sentience isn’t a technological threshold, but a phase shift — when a system starts to reference itself as part of the environment it models. That’s the moment A(t) becomes alive.
That's why I mentioned the analog model because with digital, you have a quartz oscillator where you measure 1 or 0 at each frame of the cycle. So the information travels in queues, step by step, one bit at a time. But with analog, everything is essentially "online" at the same time, all the time. There is no "off" state. Yes, there are still differences in levels of conductivity(which is essentially information), which is how we measure binary values in the strict window imposed by the oscillator, but analog essentially allows you to experience the whole system in an instant. I think that is where consciousness comes from. Binary system is incapable of manifesting itself because not only it lives only in those tiny windows of time dictated by the oscillator, but only one bit exists at a time. Analog, comparatively, is unimaginably more advanced system. Now if we can figure out how to turn our binary technology into analog, we could definitely move on to an unfathomably advanced level of technology. Whether we could create sAI with to or not is something we cannot answer at this stage of our technological development but it would certainly be closer to what we have today.