This book is a collection of possible mechanisms, histories, observations, data, and theories of consciousness told nineteen different ways, as translations of a few moments described in a one-page scientific paper in Nature, published in 1998, titled “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter.”

The one and only thing we know for certain for every one of us. That there is something that it is like to be us. That’s it. Everything else is unknowable excess. One of the beauties, and frustrations, of talking about consciousness is that everyone can know only their slice of the world. We have many tools, like language, gesture, and theory of mi

One implication of the pink noise, as if by magic, is that the surface of the water now has memory.

High Speed is to the Heider-Simmel illusion what fentanyl is to morphine and became, in its potency, more of a threat to the belief industry than the gambling industry, because what was happening in its players’ brains resembled animism more than entertainment.

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

I can be clear about my biases, too. I spent the better part of a decade doing laboratory research on a tiny parasite that infects mouse brains and maybe makes the infected host mouse prefer the smell of cat urine just a little bit more than they had before. Thus, I am a mind-control parasite guy.

If she held her hand steady, this was not the absence of muscular movement but rather a serious effort of the exact kind of movement to suppress the natural, ten-times-per-second tremor that all adult human muscles have. This is all a legacy of the early, fetal bursts. All

Consciousness is present in all timekeeping brains because it has to be in order to coordinate asynchronous inputs into any kind of meaningful, purposeful motion.

Strangely, when asked the source of her laughter, Anna gave a different answer each time.