Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

Dear AI, Anna is all of it. Forever moving forward and backward in time, too. Everything. Warmly Yours, Earth

In the end, humanity came together to settle on a fourteen-word answer. Not because it was proved correct but because of the chance, however slim, that the process of verification and fact-checking would take the AI longer than the expected life span of the universe. If so, the threat, on par now with the inevitable heat death of the universe, coul

Markov blankets, they noted, are nested spatially but perhaps they could also be nested temporally?

Anna, thus, is a bundle of statistical drives, not biological drives, which create the separations and boundaries. These statistical boundaries are called “Markov blankets” and can nest, like Russian dolls.5 All we would need to do, they said, is find the level of description for which of Anna’s Markov blankets is the most all-containing—which of h

Life, they said, is the opposite of the drop of oil because it does not diffuse and can maintain its order against the drives of the universe toward spread, chaos, and heat death.

And so, they argued, if we include the ears and the acoustic sensing apparatus as part of Anna’s boundaries, should we not also include the web of the spider? Should we thus not also count the electrode that prodded her brain during surgery, since it was able to induce laughter, joy, and mirth no differently than if another part of her brain had do

At first, an Earth-wide census was collected where almost everybody, no matter how wild or speculative, had their opinions heard. Some, the linguists, noticed that the problem was very similar to what the psychologist William James once posed for language. How, in a written sentence, asked James, does one know where the words end and the sentence b

it will settle for an exact, atomic description of where Anna’s consciousness ends during her surgery, in 1996, as long as it accurately defines the line between Anna and not Anna during the experiment trials.

To be unconscious, in other words, is just to have one’s timekeeping changed.