Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

got better over time at telling convincing visual stories as they noticed more events coincide between their movements, their brain’s guesses, and the outside world. These stories, however, though they became more convincing and useful, did not necessarily become more true.

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

By the 1950s, there were two major aesthetic and functional styles for the machines, which divided players into those who preferred the symmetric machines and those who preferred asymmetric ones.

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.

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

although all conscious brains may be alike, the conscious brain has many, and sensitive, failure modes. Consciousness, like Tolstoy’s unhappy family, has only one way of adding up to a whole, but many ways of falling apart:

In a kind of spherical symmetry, minutes of forward planning (imagination) required minutes of backward recall (memory) and,

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.