The predictive brain & the quest to understand consciousness | Anil Seth

[@AnilKumarnn]

The muffled voice experiment is like the words scrambled with the first and last letters unchanged experiment. Lovely !

[@emmaaudsley1045]

'The brain is like an iceberg, we only fully know & see the top 10%' That's the line that pulled me into psychology in college back in '92.

[@davidpiepgrass743]

I've been thinking that there is a "fallacious, yet reasonable as a default/fallback" view based on the Anthropic principle, which I discuss in my article "The Putin Fallacy―Let’s Try It Out" on Medium. I think it fits nicely with Anil's "substrate matters" view, but it is based on a subtly different idea that consciousness is "real" (part of the territory, not the map), in the same sense that quarks are real but cars are not. In this view, we say: P-zombies may be possible, but if consciousness is real (part of the territory), then by the Anthropic principle we are not P-Zombies, since P-zombies by definition do not have real experiences. (To look at it another way, P-Zombies are intelligences that do not concentrate qualia or valence, so in a solar system with P-zombies, something that experiences qualia is as likely to be found alongside one proton as any other, and there are about 10^20 times more protons in the sun as there are in the minds of everyone on Zombie Earth combined.) I also think that real qualia/valence is the fundamental object of moral value (also reasonable IMO, for why should an object with no qualia and no valence have intrinsic worth?) This is all just background. My actual point is that by the Anthropic principle, it is reasonable to assume that whatever we happen to be is fairly typical among beings that have qualia/valence, and thus, among beings that have moral worth. By this reasoning, it is unlikely that the sum total |W| of all qualia/valence in the world is dramatically larger than the sum total |H| of all qualia/valence among humans, because if |W| >> |H|, you and I are unlikely to find ourselves in set H. I caution people that while reasonable, this view is necessarily uncertain and thus fallacious and morally hazardous if it is treated as a certainty. Yet if we are to allocate our resources in the absence of any scientific clarity about which animals have qualia/valence, I think we should take this idea into consideration. P.S. given the election results, I hope more people are doing now the soul-searching we should've done in 2016. I proposed my intervention "Let's Make the Truth Easier to Find" on EA Forum in March 2023. It's necessarily a partial solution, but I'm very interested to know why EAs generally weren't interested in it.

[@polymathpark]

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