Consciousness

Recently I've heard the podcast- #173 the Reality Illusion, which delved into consciousness deeply as mathematical unit. in this episode Sam Harris with his wife Annaka Harris with Donald Hoffman
about his book “The Case Against Reality”.Annaka Harris was stringent about terminology Donald
was using, while Donald was humble enough to accept them, not to say Annaka was not incorrect to
do so. Sam was explaining various theories that were being discussed in podcast.
Broadly speaking, the podcast is divided into two parts.
I.Before “Consciousness as a basic unit.”
II. And after.
Before
They first discussed about interface problem which comprised of that evolution selected those species which were best at looking only part of physical nature. Interface is the one which mainly concentrates on Fitness points (those entities that helped the survival of the species) rather than complete physical nature. Any interface as such wouldn’t encompass a complete space-time
continuum. For e.g., part of light frequencies that we can see is different from that of a bee.
Despite there being an interface for each agent (or a person),there exist a reality. Like, moon exists
whether we see it or not. And now to space-time which they discussed to be not fundamental and
that Donald wanted to make consciousness as a fundamental and then they would access the space-
time using interface’s.
After
Panpsychism. That's what they compared his theory of consciousness as a basic fundamental unit.
Because, panpsychism proclaims that every last bit of information (even a single bit of 1 or 0) is
consciousness. And then the combination problem. Like, what does your consciousness consist of,
is it of the sum of the consciousness of individual neurons or more, and if so, what does more
consist of.
To this, Donald replied that unlike panpsychism, his mathematical theory makes the assumption that
consciousness exists despite the space-time and the lowest bit of information exists in space-time
not as a consciousness entity. To the combination problem, the answer was that every conscious
entity influences others and these influences those entities. During this part, i was completely
bewildered. But their conversations was interesting so i persisted to the end.
End
All the above witting does not even summarize the discussion. These are just my thoughts. I might
have to read the book and then listen to this podcast.

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