Living Beings Gained Consciousness So We Could Move

‘Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness’ by Patrick House

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (Bookshop)

Consciousness isn’t “passed on or recycled” from a parent to child but instead “just grows. From its own rules. All by itself. And we have no idea how or why.”

We have no idea.

Neuroscientists, as Patrick House, who is one of them, admits in his new book, “cannot even tell you what being ‘very sad’ is.”

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness isn’t a list of essential facts or components. It is what it claims to be: ways of looking. What’s offered are personal observations informed by academic reflections.

Here are my paraphrases of the first three of the 19:

1. Our brains “got better over time at telling convincing visual stories,” but these stories, though they were increasingly “useful, did not necessarily become more true.” (From my non-neuroscientist perspective, this implies a similarity between our brains and the new technology of Generative AI, both of which produce words and images that can be useful as long as facts don’t matter.)
2. “Like life,” House says, “the game of pinball is never won but, instead, can be lost less badly at some times than at others.” The pinball game High Speed in 1986 had a…