Sublime

social complexity ultimately emerges from people behaving in terms of the body-state imagery of their shared social metaphors. (If you habitually imagine your community as a family, and you have experienced loving parents, then surely your leaders have your best interests at heart.) In social

If you could figure out what patterns of neural activity in a 100-dimension population are fundamental to that population – and which are just recycled combinations of those fundamental patterns – you could explain that neural population with fewer than 100 dimensions.

consciousness is primary in the universe—it is more fundamental than physical matter and exists beyond space and time. Along these lines, there was discussion that at the deepest level of reality, there is only one consciousness, and each of our individual minds is a part of it. This idea would explain why we experience the same physical world—not

David Brewster.

tend toward a functionally agnostic flavor of physicalism.

Over the last few decades biologists have reached the firm conclusion that the man pressing the buttons and drinking the tea is also an algorithm.

chaoticism, or chaos theory. And its central idea is that really interesting, complicated things are often not best understood, cannot be understood, on a reductive level.

We now know that there can be ‘design without a designer’: knowledge without a person who created it. Some types of knowledge can be created by evolution. I shall come to that shortly.

We have this experience of a single self, but at the hardware level, the reality is that we’re a committee.