Related, consciousness frame: where is the boundary of it? Is our brain conscious, or the whole nervous system, or the whole human, or the whole human + the entire microbiome populating them, or human + robotic prosthetic limbs, or human + web search + chat AI + personal note taking app, or the whole human group (collective consciousness), etc.
Some computational theories of consciousness attempt to give a specific, mathematically formalised answer to this question.
Hmm I’m confused about why people ask “where is the boundary?” in this situation.
I visualize this situation as more of a topological map, kinda like
where the horizontal axes are kinda like physical space (more precisely: such that pieces (e.g.: your arm, your brain, web search, personal note taking app) thar are more closely connected are closer horizontally)
and the vertical axis is like “communication bandwidth”. For example, the communication bandwidth (ability to sense and control) between your brain/nervous system and your arm is pretty darn high, probably higher than almost anything else in the universe.
Yeah, you could try to cut out a particular hill in that topology and say “that hill is Bob” but that’s obviously cutting a lot of detail.
This is also maybe one of my qualms about anchoring this idea on the words “membranes” and “boundaries”… i think the actual structure is a bit more continuous. “Membranes” are a nice anchor abstraction for other reasons though so I’m sticking with it for now
Biology
Michael Levin’s work on cell cooperation
eg The Computational Boundary of a “Self”
eg Nested Selves: Self-Organization and Shared Markov Blankets in Prenatal Development in Humans
cell gap junctions
Related, consciousness frame: where is the boundary of it? Is our brain conscious, or the whole nervous system, or the whole human, or the whole human + the entire microbiome populating them, or human + robotic prosthetic limbs, or human + web search + chat AI + personal note taking app, or the whole human group (collective consciousness), etc.
Some computational theories of consciousness attempt to give a specific, mathematically formalised answer to this question.
Hmm I’m confused about why people ask “where is the boundary?” in this situation.
I visualize this situation as more of a topological map, kinda like
where the horizontal axes are kinda like physical space (more precisely: such that pieces (e.g.: your arm, your brain, web search, personal note taking app) thar are more closely connected are closer horizontally)
and the vertical axis is like “communication bandwidth”. For example, the communication bandwidth (ability to sense and control) between your brain/nervous system and your arm is pretty darn high, probably higher than almost anything else in the universe.
Yeah, you could try to cut out a particular hill in that topology and say “that hill is Bob” but that’s obviously cutting a lot of detail.
This is also maybe one of my qualms about anchoring this idea on the words “membranes” and “boundaries”… i think the actual structure is a bit more continuous. “Membranes” are a nice anchor abstraction for other reasons though so I’m sticking with it for now