Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

These effects are less like a pause button for consciousness and more like a needle lifted off a spinning record.4

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.”

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.

Which means that consciousness is not something passed on or recycled—like single molecules of water, which are retained as they move about the earth as ice, water, or dew—from one living creature to the next.

The first time your brain lied to you was the second time you opened your eyes.

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

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

To plan, one needed a sense of time, in order for there to be something unto which the plans unfurled; for there to be a sense of time, there had to be a timekeeper.

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.