140 posts tagged with consciousness.
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the metabolic cost of uncertainty
"But what if brains don’t have dedicated circuits for fighting and fleeing? People clearly experience threats, but is threat detection really a primary mode of the brain with its own neural circuitry? A body of recent evidence from my lab and elsewhere suggests that we don’t go through life constantly detecting threats and reacting with flight-or-fight circuits. Rather brains operate mainly by prediction, not reaction. All brains constantly anticipate the needs of the body and attempt to meet those needs before they arise. They seek to reduce uncertainty to survive and thrive in circumstances that are only partially predictable." The ‘Fight or Flight’ Idea Misses the Beauty of What the Brain Really Does -- an essay in SciAm by Lisa Feldman Barrett (author of the amazing How Emotions Are Made).
Issues related to octopus and crab welfare have been neglected
"Prof Birch’s team found that there was strong evidence that these creatures were sentient in that they could experience feelings of pain, pleasure, thirst, hunger, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. The conclusions led to the government including these creatures into its Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act in 2022." [more inside]
"this rat borg collective ended up [performing] better than single rats"
An emerging new picture of animal consciousness
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by 88 researchers, asks us to consider more non-human creatures as capable of subjective experiences. [more inside]
The Scientist of the Soul
The materialist world view is often associated with despair. In “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the novel’s hero, stares into the night sky, reflects upon his brief, bubblelike existence in an infinite and indifferent universe, and contemplates suicide. For Dennett, however, materialism is spiritually satisfying. [...] “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” Dennett writes, is that Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens “all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life,” which “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” He asks, “Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 [more inside]
Has Uploaded Intelligence been deleted? Or is it hiding on the web?
In September 2022, the first season of animated science fiction series Pantheon debuted on AMC+. By January of the following year, the series was cancelled and wiped from the streaming service, despite the completion of a season 2. [more inside]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?
More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.”[more inside]Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? [Archive]
A little help from their friends
Bees are capable of social learning to solve new problems. Social species of bees show the ability to learn from each other. In fact, a bee that's new to a particular pollen-retrieving problem, for example, will learn faster from an experienced fellow bee than it will on its own. [more inside]
The mind of neural networks
"Maybe we are now reaching a point where the language of psychology is starting to be appropriate to understand the behaviour of these neural networks." - llya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of Open AI. [more inside]
The Minds of Bumblebees
"...The observation that bees are most likely sentient beings has important ethical implications. It’s well known that many species of bees are threatened by pesticides and wide-scale habitat loss, and that this spells trouble because we need these insects to pollinate our crops. But is the utility of bees the only reason they should be protected? I don’t think so. The insight that bees have a rich inner world and unique perception, and, like humans, are able to think, enjoy and suffer, commands respect for the diversity of minds in nature. With this respect comes an obligation to protect the environments that shaped these minds..."
Bumblebees can create mental imagery, a 'building block of consciousness', study suggests [more inside]
Bumblebees can create mental imagery, a 'building block of consciousness', study suggests [more inside]
Atoms and Bits
The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star... [more inside]
What is it like to enforce an embargo?
In 2014, Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, published the paper "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious", putting forward the idea that if you accept that matter and physical things are at the root of everything, then if that means you believe rabbits are (or at least, can be) conscious, then the United States is probably conscious, too. [more inside]
The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang
Twelve years on, Ted Chiang remains perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. His collected works, mostly available in the anthologies Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest SF storytellers of all time (and inspired one of the best SF movies of all time). Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio versions where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his other writings, video essays, movie clips, and lots more. [more inside]
"you are asked to believe them. But I am an unreliable narrator."
"Impairment phenomenology is different from other kinds of phenomenology in that it does not assume a subject in command of their own faculties." Scholar Jonathan Sterne has written a forthcoming book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment; the introduction is now available (PDF, 54 pages, 2.5MB). The introduction briefly explains what phenomenology is, and discusses disability simulations, Sterne's own experience of thyroid cancer and an acquired impairment in his voice, the "humanities 'we'", policy implications, the interior voice, and more. It also includes excerpts from Sterne's blog posts about his disability, and a cute illustration called "Things That Are 7.5 Centimeters". [more inside]
Constructed Worlds, Group Beliefs and Narrative Consciousness
Three Simple Policy Heuristics - "The most important thing to understand is this: Harm ripples, kindness ripples. People you hurt go on to hurt other people. People who are treated with kindness become better people, or more prosperous people, and go on to help others. Yes, there are exceptions (we'll deal with those people), but they are exceptions." (via) [more inside]
What is life?
Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth - "The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself." (previously) [more inside]
Progress Studies: Uplift
How to change the course of human history - "The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors."[1] [more inside]
Is consciousness everywhere?
"Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience." Christof Koch, at MIT Press, discusses what Integrated Information Theory (IIT) has to say about consciousness: "Some level of experience can be found in all organisms, it says, including perhaps in Paramecium and other single-cell life forms. Indeed, according to IIT, which aims to precisely define both the quality and the quantity of any one conscious experience, experience may not even be restricted to biological entities but might extend to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless — a pleasing and parsimonious conclusion about the makeup of the universe."
The Space Between Life and Death
What do near-death experiences mean, and why do they fascinate us? / 'The clouds cleared': what terminal [paradoxical] lucidity teaches us about life, death and dementia [Guardian]
“you got two options. Wallow in guilt like a hero, or do something.”
Two short speculative stories featuring computers with consciousness. "Batteries For Your Doombot5000 Are Not Included" by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (published this year) is a light sf/f story about an ex-supervillain who gets a second chance at talking with a woman she had a crush on. "Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes" by Vajra Chandrasekera (audio) is "an RFC 9481-compatible full personalytic profile recorded in Binara-Unduvap 2561 (Sep-Dec 2018 in the Christian calendar) at R. Satka's home and studio in the New City in the Autonomous Territory of Vilacem. The interview interprets itself in real time as each interviewer asks their questions...Since Satka's death, this interview is her primary being-in-the-world, and retains executive authority over her estate."
Are Lucid Dreams Just Dreams of Being Lucid?
Lucid Dreaming or Dreaming That You’re Dreaming? "Why isn’t a lucid dream just a dream within a dream? Suppose I’m having a flying dream and I think, 'I must be dreaming.' I’m in a dream state, so why I am not just dreaming that I’m dreaming? To put the question another way, if there’s a difference between knowing you’re dreaming and dreaming you’re dreaming, then what exactly is it?"
Stories vs. Reality: Who Are We Without Storytelling?
- The Fundamental Difference Between Stories And Reality - "Characters have clear transformative arcs [whereas] our identities and personal journeys are so much more complex."
- Your Life is Not a Hero's Journey - "The history of the heroic adventure and the implications of projecting the hero's journey on our own lives."
- Identity Without Storytelling - "The only thing is, when it comes to the stories of our own lives, we are both author and character."[1,2,3]
The Batman of Obscenity, the Spy Who Couldn't Spell + 23 more ...
Bumblebees Solve a 17th-Century Psychological Puzzle
“None of these tasks—and the performance of the bees—is a formal indicator of consciousness. In fact, nothing is,” Chittka said at his presentation at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Austin, Tex. “But all of these taken together, I think, nudge the probabilities in the right direction.”
The story of your life, the story you tell yourself
In This Is All - "There is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory."
Time, Space and Causality
The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI - "Karl Friston's free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself." (via) [more inside]
"That has to be addressed…because pain is complicating recovery."
He’d been kept alive with breathing and feeding tubes, and until a month before his birthday party in January 2016, he’d been known only as “Sixty-Six Garage.” That was the name on his hospital bracelet, the name on the door to his room, the name on the sign above his bed, the name the state of California used to pay the nursing home for his care. It’s the name he probably would have been buried with if Ed Kirkpatrick, director of the Villa Coronado Skilled Nursing Facility, hadn’t let me into Room 20 — Garage’s room.
Joanne Faryon in the LA Times: Who is he, and is it possible he's conscious? (via)
Joanne Faryon in the LA Times: Who is he, and is it possible he's conscious? (via)
Animal consciousness, featuring bears and octopuses
The Vivid Inner Worlds Of Animals. "'An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.' That's from philosopher Martin Buber. If you've ever looked into a dog's eyes, you've seen it. There's something there, whether happy or sad or worried — all part of that something that appears to be consciousness and emotion. Despite groans of anthropomorphism, a growing number of scientists and writers say it's not your imagination. Animals have a far deeper internal life than we've known." [more inside]
sbt-ethereum
Ethereum for humans - "A bit pathetically, much of what I have been doing for the past two years is working on a software project called sbt-ethereum."[1] [more inside]
Technology, Law and Political Economy for Humans
How China Is Planning to Rank 1.3 Billion People - "Yet educated, urban Chinese take a positive view, seeing social credit systems as a means to promote honesty in society and the economy rather than a privacy violation, according to a poll by Mercator Institute for China Studies."[1] [more inside]
"without first getting some kind of serious ethical guidance."
Scientists revive pig brains somewhat in the lab. "a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored." (Caution: does involve some discussion of animal slaughter, not gratuitous)
Peter Sjöstedt-H on Mind, Panpsychism, Philosophy and Psychedelics
The foundation of Western philosophy is probably rooted in psychedelics. "In the 1960s, intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley were fascinated by the effects of LSD, but today most professors are far too worried about respectability and tenure to investigate psychedelics themselves. Which is somewhat ironic, given that the field of Western philosophy has a huge debt to psychedelics, according to Peter Sjöstedt-H, a philosoph[er] who has written a book on the philosophical significance of drugs. In fact, one of Plato’s most-cited theories may have been a direct result of hallucinogenics." [more inside]
Rethinking Animals
Maybe a fish's on-deck thrashing is really a "a silent scream, born of the fish’s belief that it has entered a permanent state of extreme suffering."
Understanding Reality: What Hallucinations Reveal
Hallucinations Are Everywhere: Experiences like hearing voices are leading psychologists to question how all people perceive reality.
Lesson for the 21st Century
Why Technology Favors Tyranny - "Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it." (via)
Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?
Is This the World’s Most Bizarre Scholarly Meeting? What would Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, a very friendly robot, plus a bevy of scientists, mystics, and wannabe scholars do at a fancy resort in Arizona? Perhaps real harm to the field of consciousness studies, for one thing. (SL Chronicle of Higher Education)
Morality Tales and Narrative Consciousness
Why humans need stories - "From fireside folk tales to Netflix dramas, narratives are essential to every society – and evolutionary theorists are now trying to figure out why." (via)
“Committed to the goal of archiving your mind”
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal.” Nectome will preserve your brain, but you have to be euthanized first. [more inside]
Towards an Empathic Civilization
The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy - "Where do we go from here? In this feature-length documentary, social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new economic system." (previously) [more inside]
Consciousness and Conscience
But even as Switzerland provides animals with increasing legal protections, some animal advocates say the rights currently afforded to animals don’t go far enough. […] Lauren Choplin of the non-profit Nonhuman Rights Project, which litigates for animals’ fundamental rights, told Quartz on Jan. 17, “in our view, the law hasn’t caught up to what we know about animal cognition, and it needs to.” Indeed, our evolving understanding of animal consciousness suggests that we have some uncomfortable philosophical and legal work ahead.[more inside]
Alive Inside
Across the country each year, thousands of people are wrongly labeled unconscious after suffering severe brain injuries. Among the survivors, a few, including Nick Tullier, make it to a Houston rehab hospital, where those with even the worst prognoses get a shot at recovery. (SLHoustonChronicle) [more inside]
Like having your mind disassembled, then put back together again
The gateway to mind-wandering
Spacing out is so important to us as a species that “it could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals."Manoush Zomorodi discusses boredom.
In Telepathic Society, One Who Can Hide Thoughts Is King
Hugh Howey: How to Build a Self-Conscious Machine - "Unlike the direction most autonomous vehicle research is going—where engineers want to teach their car how to do certain things safely—our team will instead be teaching an array of sensors all over a city grid to watch other cars and guess what they're doing." [more inside]
"A glutinous mass, endowed with a malignant will"
Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Amia Srinivasan in the LRB. (Previously on the strangeness of octopi.)
The Spice Flows
How Mushrooms Became Magic - "Psilocybin affects us humans because it fits into receptor molecules that typically respond to serotonin—a brain-signaling chemical. Those receptors are ancient ones that insects also share, so it's likely that psilocybin interferes with their nervous system, too. 'We don't have a way to know the subjective experience of an insect', says Slot, and it's hard to say if they trip. But one thing is clear from past experiments: Psilocybin reduces insect appetites. By evolving the ability to make this chemical, which prevents the munchies in insects, perhaps some fungi triumphed over their competitors, and dominated the delicious worlds of dung and rotting wood." (via) [more inside]
Consciousness consciousness
From Nautil.us Magazine's current thematic issue on Consciousness, a series of short essays, including:Is matter conscious? Is there awareness behind vegetative states? What do animals see in the mirror? Do Aliens have inalienable rights?
Art is not born of us, but through us
"Visionary art" is a catch-all term for visual art that aims to express mystical, transcendental, psychedelic and dream experiences. As with other mediums and styles, women are underrepresented but by no means absent. Though select artists such as Amanda Sage, Allyson Grey and Autumn Skye Morrison often collaborate with and have their work displayed alongside male contemporaries, many more artists remain relatively obscure. [more inside]
Daniel Dennett
"As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett's side of the field. It seems natural to say that she 'sort of' thinks, knows, cares, remembers, understands, and that she is 'sort of' conscious. It seems obvious that there is no 'light switch' for consciousness: she is present and absent in different ways, depending on which of her subsystems are functioning. I still can't quite picture how neurons create consciousness." Joshua Rothman on Daniel C. Dennett. [SLNewYorker]