Great article. Fascinating subject.

So, to paraphrase—the universe creates simplified placeholders for real complexity when it hits a computational ‘buffer overflow’.

I suspect we will find the computational limits of the universe are also relevant to consciousness. That is, billions of years ago, biological systems evolved a mechanism to access for themselves the computational substrate the universe uses to ‘solve’ the Schrodinger equations.

The same ‘buffer overflow’ occurs when a mind accessing the computational substrate to compute its behavior reaches a critical limit — in the language you use above, this threshold is like the ‘Avogadro’s number of cognition’.

In a mind, this simplification creates a flash of consciousness when all the trillions of individual patterns and entangled relationships are replaced by high-level placeholders like hunger or love…

(This is still a ‘conjecture in progress’, but I wrote an essay on this here: https://medium.com/@tobyweston/what-is-consciousness-37b95866689e)