[GodofReason]

Consciousness! Weighty subject indeed. This is my first post, so I'll try to be circumspect as possible, but I'm a lot like Wiz in that I have my own answer for virtually everything. So, first off, Hey Wiz! I think your perspective is obviously something you've spent a great deal of time developing, so I am reluctant to begin to question it in specific terms until I read more carefully what you have to say, and get a broader idea of your comprehensive world-view. But generally speaking, I think how you define consciousness is more properly "human consciousness". That is, I think there are a lot states of self awareness that are less "information" based and more purely perceptive as evidenced in most mammals and higher life forms. I think a dog knows that it's alive and separate from its environment. This may seem to be purely a matter of semantics, but isn't everything?

Secondly, I think that consciousness is a lot more involved in the maintenance of the physical world than we realize. With Heisenberg's uncertainty issues and observer-dependent realities in relativity beginning to surface in the practice of hard science, I think that we will soon begin to suspect that our perceptive world and what we call the objective physical world are more interdependent than we imagine.

Nothing is extant in our individual or collective understanding but that it is not first perceived. That we perceive very common objective sensory arrangements of the world does not necessarily mean that the world is independent of mechanism of perception, only that the perception is common. What if the process of perception is far more complicated than the structure it perceives? We'd have no way of knowing. It would be more than just a virtual world. The universe could be a perceptive construct of infinite resolution within which, locally introspective or recursive perception self-organizes (life evolves).

As a possible structural scenario, I might suggest that the "real world" could be semantically characterized as an enormously rigid and ruthlessly unforgiving "dream" (you only wake up once). With science being seen as the study of the specific rules of the dream, it would change nothing in the overall structure of human knowledge other than offering a perspective of why it is so monumentally difficult for us to define "consciousness."

That we are developing virtual worlds in the digital intricacies of silicon circuitry should not necessarily be seen as a source for our psychological misconception that the so called "real world" may itself virtual, but as a normal emergence in our evolution. Digital virtualiity may be a structural indication of how essential perception is in the whole process.