18-11-27 Consciousness Decomposition

Category: Idea Lists (Upon Request)

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This conflation does so much damage.

1. Consciousness as self-awareness (or awareness of self-awareness)
   1. System, paying attention to its own workings, self-modifying as need be
2. Consciousness as first person, felt-sense experience (what it is like to be something, qualia)
   1. Sensations, emotions, desires, thoughts, drives
   2. Involves attention (you are always conscious of some target, whether it be your fingers on a laptop, your thoughts, the snores of your sleeping loved one)
      1. Dreams as
   3. Unclear path from biochemistry to lived experience (strong mutual information, though, indicating likely causal links)
3. Consciousness as emergent vs. non-emergent
   1. Emergent
      1. Out of the connections between non-conscious entities
   2. Non-emergent
      1. Panpsychism
      2. High levels of ‘integrated information’
4. Solipsism (everything (including reality) as generated by the mind, where reality has a stronger feedback loop than dreams or visions)
5. Theories
   1. Integrated Information Theory (Tononi)
   2. Global Workspace Theory (Bernard Barr)
   3. Oscillations (Crick, Koch)
   4. Brain Waves, Neuroacoustics (Atasoy’s Connectome Harmonics)
   5. Panpsychism (Everything material has some degree of consciousness)

(Hard problem of consciousness) Integrate information theory Panpsychism

Consciousness as emergent vs. non-emergent

Need for a bridge between bio-chemical behavior (at every level of analysis, including at the level of brain waves / harmonics / resonance) and experience itself.

Key arguments:

1. Once consciousness (as subjective experience) is understood, it will lose its religious mystique
2. Knowing the answer

Source: Original Google Doc