Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - by Patrick House

Dolphins or whales, which crawled back into water after a brief stint as hippos, saddened by how murky it was, used all the vocal tricks learned on land to re-create through echolocation and sonar, as much as possible, the range of visual distance the eyes granted.

Like life, the game of pinball is never won but, instead, can be lost less badly at some times than at others.

Zugunruhe, a German term, and translated it roughly, perhaps poetically, as “the anxiety felt by migratory birds prevented from migrating.”

Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music.

We took the motion required to predict the effects of our motions and internalized them in order to achieve thinking.

What about a caterpillar when it turns into a butterfly? When it is liquid goo during its metamorphosis, is it butterfly or caterpillar or what? The brain is never in exactly the same state. A child’s mind metamorphoses into an adult’s mind. It does not simply grow. From a purely biochemical point of view, the human brain thus is always comparable to metamorphic goo.

Your brain is spending gobs of stored metabolism keeping track of the walls and ceilings and their spatial arrangement specifically with respect to you, all so that you perceive a virtual reality with you at its center. What we see is not the object itself, but an evolved decoding of the parts of that object relevant to survival, not to the truth. A red pill is not red. A blue pill is not blue. They are the same color, which is to say that they are no color at all, to all but our eyes. What you experience are the brain’s deductions about the relevance of objects or a room’s layout to you, to your survival, and to your goals.

A cat one hundred feet away is not actually smaller than a cat nearby at your feet. Your brain simply chooses to depict it as smaller because things farther away are less likely to harm you.

A bit of electricity can cause a brain to experience movements, emotions, sensations, memories, urges: laughter with or without mirth, the feeling that the body is levitating or floating, vertigo, dissociation, the sensation of “falling flat”, blurred vision, nausea, sounds seeming “distant”, blurred or distorted faces, déjà vu, an inability to count, speak, read, name things, or breathe, a fleeting, transient depression.

If you look at castles built during the Crusades, you will find holes in the walls and may, at first, believe that these were made as places to shoot arrows from. They were not. When the castle was built, there was no free-standing scaffolding, so wood logs were driven between the stones until the next layer and another platform could be added. Then the wooden scaffolding was removed. Any explanation that the holes were constructed in order to shoot arrows from - despite how well suited they appear for the task, after the fact - is incorrect, and the lesson applies wholesale to castles as well as to all of biology. Many erroneous assumptions are likewise made when one looks at any modern mammalian brain and infers, hundreds of millions of years after its creation, purpose from function. Brains are not the product of a single evolutionary line with any kind of plan or reason but a Frankensteinian patchwork of error, theft, malformation, crookedness, accident, and chance.

Baghdad airport highway intuition: We’re driving along, and my driver, this enlisted man, this kid, slams on the brakes, cuts across the median, and heads back to Camp Victory. And I said “What happened?” And he said “I don’t know, something felt wrong.” He was very upset. We-were-going-to-die upset. I let him go for a while, and later I said, “What do you think it was?” He says, “There were no kids. We drive that same route every day at the same time and there are kids kicking around an old soccer ball, in that field, and today there were none. And that felt really dangerous to me. And thinking about it, it’s because the moms know when the bad guys have planted a roadside bomb, and they keep their kids away.”

Anytime one learns a new skill, that awareness fades into the background of the littler brain with practice. Intuition is the reasoned product of a lifetime of careful, metabolically expensive observation. Intuition works so well because the brain is predicting everything all the time. The ringing red bell of alarm was a mismatch in their observed statistics of how things should be.

Most of the brain’s neurons are devoted to prediction and feedback so that the brain can learn and update the validity of previous predictions.

“Elegance is refusal.” - Coco Chanel

Those interested in animal conservation have a bias toward “charismatic megafauna”.

The difference between biology and physics is the difference between dropping a pigeon and a bowling ball from high atop a tower.

If the goal of the brain is to predict, and prediction means silencing, do bodies disappear when their goal is done - when they’ve predicted everything? That can’t be right.

The way out of a whirlpool is not to swim against it but rather to give in and let it take you around a full loop to the top, upriver, but where escape is easiest.

“But no one knows for certain And so it’s all the same to me I think I’ll just let the mystery be” - Iris DeMent

Theories of how the brain works latch on to whatever complicated technology or idea exists at the time. Hence, we got steam-based theories of the brain in the eighteenth century, computational theories in the twentieth. It implies that no matter how complicated a discovery we make, nature has already both known and taken advantage of the phenomenon.

Why is it the case that there is not one kind of “what it is like” to be human?

Brain’s only output is the motor neuron, so consciousness must do only one thing well: Reduce the cost of movement by making the world appear simple and actable. Make movements more efficient through prediction of what movements will do based on everything that has been tried before.

Within every raw block of marble of considerable size and quality is a statue of the David just waiting for someone to come along and chip away the unnecessary bits. So, too, does a brain create a story of self. From this totality of incoming input we expertly carve out the relevance of light and sound and call it “seeing” and “hearing”.

She imagines how the men, who have never themselves met, might interact. She “endlessly considered in her mind, first each of them separately, then the two together.” Such conscious simulations help the human brain generalize similar features of objects, locations, or people without having to experience them in every possible situation. They act as a kind of educated practice and, as data from the results of the simulations accumulate in the mind, the results can be used for ever further simulations.

Stoics engaged in premeditation: prestudying bad future. We spend almost half of our waking thoughts reliving memories or planning for the future.

The act of reporting a thought also changes it.

Consciousness evolved because it is an incomparable playground for learning. Mind wandering is not random. It is purposeful, careful, and efficient.

A mouse, seconds after it is plucked from a maze, shows signs of neural activity as if it is replaying, at a rapid speed, and sometimes backward, pieces of the maze it just left.

A one-terabyte hard drive full of data weighs more than an empty one, but a monkey brain full of memories weighs no more than an empty one, and a conscious monkey brain no more than an unconscious one.

It is harder to create a robotic soccer fan than a robotic soccer player. It is harder to create a sex-enjoying robot than a sex robot.

Principles of simplicity, elegance, and beauty drive physicists.

People thought the sun revolved around the earth because it looked like it did. What would the sun’s arc in the sky be if the opposite of what it merely looked like were true? It would appear identical. Intuition alone could not distinguish which of the competing ideas was correct. Nothing about any theory of how the brain works tells us definitively how the feeling of subjectivity unfolds from its workings.

Most people cannot tickle themselves, but those with a tendency toward schizophrenia sometimes can.