consciousness

“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain... See more

Your EEG is an ocean. Separating this signal out into different waveforms can tell us a bunch about what you’re experiencing. We might look at your beta waves, from 15-30 Hz, which are associated with your experience of active conscious processing. Or theta, from 4-7 Hz, which you make lots of in REM sleep, as well as flow, hypnagogic, and creative... See more

the pregnant person body is not an ‘external environment’ within which the foetus is solitary and ‘confined’, waiting for the ‘lightbulb’ of consciousness to be switched on at a given timepoint when the neurogenesis is completed. Here I propose that both the easy and hard problem of developmental consciousness cannot be addressed without putting

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If consciousness really can arise in a jumble of silicon chips, we run the risk of creating countless AIs — beings, really — that can not only intelligently perform tasks, but develop feelings about their lives. 

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Rather than asking if each new AI system is finally the one that has conscious experience, focusing on the more fundamental question of

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