The Simulation You Call “I”

A book that dissolves the Hard Problem of consciousness, provides an engineering blueprint for artificial consciousness, and extends the framework to cosmology.

What This Book Does

• Proposes a four-model architecture (IWM, ISM, EWM, ESM) that explains why it feels like something to be a conscious system
• Derives the architecture from first principles: self-referential computation at criticality
• Connects consciousness to cosmology through the SB-HC4A framework — same computational pattern, different scale
• Makes testable predictions about neural criticality, anesthetic mechanisms, and phenomenology

Background

This is the modern successor to Die Emergenz des Bewusstseins (2015, German, 300 pages). The theoretical framework has been significantly expanded and is now accompanied by two formal papers:

• The Four-Model Theory of Consciousness — the core theory (Gruber, 2026)
• Emergent Spacetime from Self-Referential Computation — cosmological extension (Gruber, 2026)

Get the Book

All nine editions are available today. English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese come in paperback, hardcover and Kindle; Japanese and Dutch in paperback and Kindle; Simplified Chinese as a Kindle eBook. Three more — Korean, Greek, and a Simplified Chinese print edition — are on the way.

Coming soon

Translations complete, native review under way. No purchase link until each edition is live.

Research

Papers and source material at github.com/JeltzProstetnic/aIware.