General Consciousness is defined by two qualities: Binding: All the information that’s part of a conscious experience is experienced at once, and from a single perspective Boundary: Any processing of the information is excluded from the conscious experience, it happens before or after the information is experienced. This kind of structure has been described as the Binding and Boundary...
Imagination: a feedback loop of expectations Imagination is a difficult concept to define because it’s so tied up in our idea of what it means to be conscious, or even what it means to be human. We can imagine things that are very simple things or very in depth, and we can talk about an idea like “imagine what it would be like to imagine”, and we do these kinds of things constantly. There’s a lot...
As far as we know, there’s only one way to be conscious, so it’s possible that in that one way we’re all exactly the same. That’s an assumption, but it’s a safer assumption than the alternative. If we assume that we’re all different, and it turns out that we’re actually all the same, that’s a pretty big mistake. But if we’re actually all...
Physical – relating to the set of all things that can interact with one another Mental – relating to neurological processes that we’re consciously aware of The categories of physical and mental are often used to split everything up into two entirely different worlds: one world that we’ve been able to increasingly understand through science and another world that we barely understand, that we only...
Individual Consciousness – the ability to experience and remember pain and pleasure Note: This definition was originally for “consciousness”, but I’ve renamed it to “individual consciousness” to denote that it’s the kind of consciousness we experience as humans. It focuses on the qualities and qualia that we experience and are important to us...
Meaning – Layers of association between experience and feedback from joy and suffering Where does meaning come from? Whether it’s meaning in our lives or the meaning of a word, we might assume that meaning comes from some purpose. But what if we suddenly found out what the purpose to life was? What if the Brain Box Earth was real, and the aliens eventually told us that they’d created the...
Learning: Efficiently encoding responses to stimuli I want to distinguish between learning and memory. These two ideas are often used interchangeably. For example, if I’m learning to hit a golf ball, we might talk about muscle “memory,” and if I memorize a fact, we might say I’ve “learned” it. In neuroscience, what we typically called memory is often referred to as declarative or explicit memory...
Emotion: experience caused by a difference between observations and expectations Defining emotion is hard because emotions are both fundamental to what it is to feel human and seem to be out of our control. They feel like they happen to us while also being an important part of who we are. At first, this seems like a contradiction. How can they both be part of us and also happening to us? Can a...
Intelligence: a measure of the ability to compare concepts When we try to define intelligence, we typically start with something that we know exhibits intelligent behavior—humans—and work from there. Animals that act more like us are considered more intelligent, and things that act less like us are less intelligent. Then, working backwards, we assume there’s some quality we call intelligence that...
Concept: a collection of indistinguishable minimum sufficient causes When thinking about definitions, I am always struck by how easily we can switch between different perspectives. We can define and think about something as complex as a human as a single coherent thing. Then we can change our perspective and think about ourselves as a collection of parts, as a skeleton plus muscles, organs, and a...