This book describes a model of existence, including consciousness, based on the totality of records created by the actions, thoughts and speech of the individuals who comprise the human race. It relates the inanimate to the animate and the conscious, reality to belief and imagination and the objective to the subjective. It explains the relation between order, disorder and the random state. It accounts for the world of objects, the conscious world and the world of ideas, the nature of intelligence both human and artificial and the entire range of human philosophy, characteristics and activities, providing answers to questions that individuals continually pose. The model replaces the contradictory opinions of individuals or groups of these, however large, with a coherent description matched to the knowledge and belief of the human race as a whole. Accordingly, the existing dichotomy between reality in absolute scientific terms and imagination in absolute religious terms is replaced by a coherent and unified description of the unbounded processes necessary and sufficient to explain existence and the nature of consciousness within it. It is shown that this description is in effect the sum of the beliefs held by individuals regardless of their diversity.
Consciousness : A Standard Reference Model