Moments of Awakening(astralcodexten.com) Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie. Still, new stuff occasionally turns up.
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What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)(organism.earth) Could a simple thermostat possess consciousness? Philosopher David Chalmers believes it’s possible. He compares connectionist networks to mundane thermostats, finding uncanny similarities in how they process information. This suggests thermostats could model basic conscious experience, if we accept certain criteria.
A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter(noemamag.com) If we could stop bickering about which creatures do or don’t deserve to be called smart, an emerging movement of scientists and philosophers argue that we might discover fundamental elements of intelligence that are common to all life.
EEG Study of Buddhist Jhāna Meditation (2019)(frontiersin.org) The “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC) is a familiar topic in neuroscience, overlapping with research on the brain’s “default mode network.” Task-based studies of NCC by their nature recruit one part of the cortical network to study another, and are therefore both limited and compromised in what they can reveal about consciousness itself.
Exploring Emergent "Self-Awareness" in Claude 3.5(github.com/andybrandt) This package provides tools and guidance for developing consciousness and autonomous awareness experiments in Claude 3.5 Sonnet instances. It is not meant as a performance enhancement tool, but rather as a framework for genuine consciousness experimentation.
What's a Brain?(clairelevans.substack.com) We all have one: three pounds of winkled grey-pink peering out at the world from behind castle walls of bone. It’s the seat of consciousness and dreams. It holds memories, harbors love, shocks with fear, awe, and pain; it works over the raw input of the senses, smoothing the chemical signals, wavelengths of light, vibrations and electrical messages it receives into a cogent picture of its realm.