Consciousness might feel so non-physical because it’s doubly substrate-independent: if consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways, then it’s merely the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing.

Neuroscience experiments suggest that many behaviors and brain regions are unconscious, with much of our conscious experience representing an after-the-fact summary of vastly larger amounts of unconscious information.

The problem of understanding intelligence shouldn’t be conflated with three separate problems of consciousness: the “pretty hard problem” of predicting which physical systems are conscious, the “even harder problem” of predicting qualia, and the “really hard problem” of why anything at all is conscious.

sapience (the ability to think intelligently) with sentience (the ability to subjectively experience qualia).

There’s no undisputed definition of “consciousness.” I use the broad and non-anthropocentric definition consciousness = subjective experience.

It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.

A drop of water is wet, but an ice crystal and a cloud of steam aren’t, even though they’re made of identical water molecules. Why? Because the property of wetness depends only on the arrangement of the molecules. It makes absolutely no sense to say that a single water molecule is wet, because the phenomenon of wetness emerges only when there are

Figure 8.3: The visual, auditory, somatosensory and motor cortices are involved with vision, hearing, the sense of touch and motion activation, respectively—but that doesn’t prove they’re where consciousness of vision, hearing, touch and motion occurs. Indeed, recent research suggests that the primary visual cortex is completely unconscious,

conscious information processing should be thought of as the CEO of our mind, dealing with only the most important decisions requiring complex analysis of data from all over the brain.