Sublime

They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.

If neuromodulators can release the activity of neurons in a circuit from the strict constraints of their architecture, then structure is not destiny.

Looking to the future, some neuroscientists envision a dramatic transformation of criminal law. David Eagleman, for one, welcomes a time when “we may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation [and] eventually think about bad decision making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes

The middle prefrontal region creates links among the following widely separated and differentiated neural regions: the cortex, limbic areas, and brainstem within the skull, and the internally distributed nervous system of the body proper.

You are more than your genes. You are your connectome.

Science knows surprisingly little about mind and consciousness. Current orthodoxy holds that consciousness is created by electrochemical reactions in the brain, and that mental experiences fulfill some essential data-processing function. However, nobody has any idea how a congeries of biochemical reactions and electrical currents in the brain creat

“a phenomenological model of consciousness based on information theory.” This representation of consciousness is phenomenological in that it deals directly with events—phenomena—as we experience and interpret them, rather than focusing on the anatomical structures, neurochemical processes, or unconscious purposes that make these events possible.

My bet is that the brain, considered as a computer, is a classical one. But that issue is independent of Penrose’s ideas. He is not arguing that the brain is a new sort of universal computer, differing from the universal quantum computer by having a larger repertoire of computations made possible by new, post-quantum physics. He is arguing for a ne