Susan Blackmore on Consciousness


At 2 minutes 20 seconds she talks about the difficulties of looking for neural correlates of consciousness in brains. I wouldn't expect to be able to locate consciousness in a brain either, but it doesn't seem too weird, to me, to look for some set of physical measurements which could accurately predict that a subject is in fact conscious at some time. I would expect them to be measurements of the brain as well as the enteric and autonomic nervous systems, and probably also a significant part of the skin and the contents of the bowels. I don't claim this is a scientific hypothesis though, it is just a "gut feeling" based on personal experience. See On Psychobotanics and Neurology and Nancy Trivellato on Disembodied Consciousness. See also the way Annaka Harris describes a spectrum of consciousness in Annaka Harris on Consciousness.


Something gives me the idea now that Hillary Nicholson has been watching YouTube videos, ... Hey, Hillary, have you got a copy of that weird essay about lambda calculus that I sent to you fifteen or so years ago? That might be a good way of explaining why we shouldn't expect to find universal neural correlates of any specific experience. That's just because it's all joined-up, and we are all each-other's context for interpreting descriptions. Ask Hillary what she is conscious of when she listens to this track. So, if you could contact my daughter, Hillary, she might have a copy of an essay I sent her about what a law of physics really is, ... and then you could maybe make sense of my rambling about abstract language being "everything".

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