Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

Recent research discovered a startling facet of life—brief periods during which consciousness is absent while the body carries on its well-rehearsed duties: driving, doing the dishes, or reading a long and uninspiring office memo. To an observer, everything looks normal while the subject is, in fact, zoned out. During these episodes of mind blankin

A large region in the back of the neocortex, including temporal, parietal, and occipital neighborhoods, is closely linked to subjective experiences of sight, hearing, touch, and sensing of the body and the self. Because of its close association with consciousness, this region, the current best NCC candidate, is termed the posterior hot zone.

One common observation is that psychedelics destabilize longrange cortical communication patterns and reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus in the posterior regions of the neocortex. This is the compatible with our knowledge of the brains of people trained in mindfulness. It appears that the less these midline structures a

The axioms are about essential properties of experience. Many articles and my last book have dealt with these, so I will be brief.

The first axiom is intrinsicality. This means that any experience is subjective, existing for itself, not for others. It exists from the intrinsic perspective, from within, not from an outsider's perspective.

The second a

if you believe in computational functionalism, then a sufficiently accurate simulation of your connectome will be conscious (whether it will be your mind, let alone a sane rather than a mad mind, is a different matter). If you believe that consciousness is a structure of causal relationships, an essential aspect of reality tied to its physical subs

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror. Att

Due to inherent and unavoidable randomness in nature, toggling tiny synapses on and off does not always lead to the same, reproducible result each time. Thus, a more general approach is to consider conditional probabilities: if ten synaptic inputs are activated, the neuron turns on 75 percent of the time and remains off the other 25 percent. The ou

Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is intrinsic causal power, not computation. Causal power is not something intangible, ethereal, but something physical—the extent to which the system's recent past specifies its present state (cause power) and the extent to which this current state specifies its immediate future (effect pow

These observations refute the myth that consciousness simply arises from neurons doing their thing. Here are billions of cerebellar cells doing what comes naturally to them, firing action potentials and releasing little squirts of neurotransmitter, yet without any feelings. What matters is not the constitution of brain tissue but the way it is wire