Abstract

Many thinkers, past, and present, have tried to solve the underlying mystery of consciousness. Yet, no one has ever categorically expressed its exact concrete essence, scope, or meaning until a new school of thought known as Autognorics was conceptualized in 1988 by Joey Lawsin. Consciousness, awareness, and self-realization, are three different things that can not be properly explained by science and philosophy due to the fact that their theoretical and philosophical bases are misguided. When the bases are incorrect, the outcomes will be incorrect too. Consciousness, awareness, and self-realization, as well as being alive, living, and with life, are different terms that are always being interchanged and misinterpreted to be all one and the same. In this paper, they are properly corrected individually and accurately redefined. The findings uncovered in Autognorics, the science of engineered life forms (SELFS), reveal that Life is a sequential evolutionary progression that begins from being alive to having life. Rather than as a detailed thesis, the seven sequential criteria or evolutionary signatures of life are addressed here in an outline format: (i)Mechanical Aliveness, (ii)Sensoric Awareness, (iii)Logical Intuitiveness, (iv)Aneural Consciousness, (v)Information Inlearness, (vi)Symbiotic Living, and (vii)Self-Emergence. Thus, to be conscious, something must be alive (self-energized), aware (with sensors), intuitive(logic), and aneural (a brain without the brain). Consciousness is the ability of an object to match or associate things with other things. On the other hand, to emerge as "me" (thy Self), the seven evolutionary orders of life must be met accordingly. A seed specimen called ELFS, or engineered life forms, is one of the aneural experiments developed primarily to address and rewrite the true essence of life and consciousness. Aside from the various aneural prototypes, neural specimens such as dogs, mice, birds, fish, plants, and molds were utilized as well in the research to eliminate the misguided overrated concept that consciousness emerges solely in creatures with brains or neurons. Life, consciousness, thoughts, emotions, animations, dreams, music, colors, senses, and the self are known as Interims because they only emerge when objects that cause them to exist are present. This is based on the Theory of Generated Interim Emergence, also known as the Single Theory of Everything, that claims "Everything exists because other things cause it to exist, otherwise, everything never existed at all".