Patrick House and others explore whether your brain deceives you about consciousness and memory. They discuss how your brain makes cognitive trade-offs, what happens to your sense of self during metamorphosis, and whether memory is reliable or constructed.
Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where's the line between inside and outside, between life and not life, between the parts of the universe that are conscious and those that are not? Between you and not you? The first time your brain ever lied to you was the second time you opened your eyes.
If we look at the boundary of consciousness, do we have to include all the parasites that are in us also? So by Patrick House.
Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside, between life and not life, between the parts of the universe that are conscious and those that are not? Between you and not you? I think that's really beautiful.
And in fact, chapter six, the Second Hand Markov Blanket, talks about simulations and like how this idea that like we respond to is actually, I think very similar to Donald Hoffman's work, which is the idea that we don't respond to like necessarily truth in the world, information. We respond to information in the world that affects our homeostatic relationships. And so there's a, there's an idea that there's a cognitive trade off between language being able to have linguistic development and like the, the pace at which like you, you memorize, you can memorize things in environment as a primate.
I friggin love this one. And so that was what humanity had to go through in this story, which is. And thought experiment, which is, what is that answer?
And Patrick's work definitely has this like this embedded question about like, if we look at the boundary of consciousness, do we have to include all the parasites that are in us also? Is that like part of the equation?
I love that visualization of what comes up to mind. It's just a provocative visualization. The question of when does the caterpillar becomes the butterfly?
I have to bring up Michael Levin's work on improvisational memory. And please, he based it on his observation in a lab of like, they trained a caterpillar to do something and then it metamorphosized into a butterfly and it retained the memory, but it used it in sort of like a different way that was like more butterfly specific. And so it led him to this like philosophical theory of he calls self improvising selves, where like you think of the actual structure of memory is a communication to your future self.
