A qualia representation of cyberspace

Abstract

E.C Adam defined Situational Awareness (SA) as "the mental representation and understanding of objects, events, people, system states, interactions, environmental conditions, and other situation-specific factors affecting human performance in complex and dynamic tasks. Stated in lay terms, SA is simply knowing what is going on so you can figure out what to do." We propose a novel idea to assist the human in gaining SA. Our hypothesis is that nature uses qualia as a compression scheme to represent the many concepts encountered in everyday life. Qualia enable humans to quickly come up with SA based on many complex measurements from their sensors, (eyes, ears, taste, touch, memory, etc.), expectations, and experiences. Our ultimate objective is to develop a computer that uses qualia concepts to transform sensor data to assist the human in gaining and maintaining improved SA. However, before any computer can use qualia, we must first define a representation for qualia that can be implemented computationally. This paper will present our representation for qualia. The representation is not simply a hierarchical aggregation of input data. Instead, it is a prediction of what will happen next, derived from computations resulting from sensory inputs and the computational engine of a qualia generator and qualia processor.