Being You : A New Science of Consciousness

A creature that comes into being only for a moment will be conscious just as long as there is something it is like to be it, even if all that’s happening is a fleeting feeling of pain or pleasure.

our conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is nothing at all: no world, no self, no interior and no exterior.

anaesthesia is the art of turning people into objects.

In humans, this ‘mirror self-recognition’ ability tends to develop some time between eighteen and twenty-four months of age. This doesn’t mean that younger infants lack consciousness – only that their awareness of themselves as an individual, as separate from others, may not have fully formed before this age.

Who passes the mirror test? Among mammals, some great apes, a few dolphins and killer whales, and a single Eurasian elephant. A parade of other mammalian creatures, including pandas, dogs, and various monkeys, have failed – at least so far.

Importantly, living systems are not closed, isolated systems. Living systems are in continual open interaction with their environments, harvesting resources, nutrients, and information. It is by taking advantage of this openness that living systems are able to engage in the energy-thirsty activity of seeking out statistically expected states, minimising entropy, and warding off the second law.

Across
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every aspect of being a self, we perceive ourselves as stable over time because we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves, not in order to know ourselves.

The most fundamental reason any organism has a brain – or any kind of nervous system – is to help it stay alive, through making sure that its physiological essential variables remain within the tight ranges compatible with its continued survival.

res cogitans (mind stuff) and res extensa (matter stuff).

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.