Kaj_sotala’s book summary provided me with something I hadn’t seen before—a non-mysterious answer to the question of consciousness. And I say this as someone who took graduate level courses in neuroscience (albeit a few years before the book was published).
Briefly, the book defines consciousness as the ability to access and communicate sensory signals, and shows that this correlates highly with those signals being shared over a cortical Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW). It further correlates with access to working memory.
The review also gives a great account of the epistemic status of the major claims in the book. It reviews the evidence from several experiments discussed in the book itself. The review also goes beyond this, discussing the epistemic status of those experiments (e.g. in light of the replication crisis in psychology).
So kudos to both the book author and the review author. A decent follow-up would be to link these findings to the larger lesswrong agenda (although I note this review is part of a larger sequence that includes additional nominations).
Kaj_sotala’s book summary provided me with something I hadn’t seen before—a non-mysterious answer to the question of consciousness. And I say this as someone who took graduate level courses in neuroscience (albeit a few years before the book was published). Briefly, the book defines consciousness as the ability to access and communicate sensory signals, and shows that this correlates highly with those signals being shared over a cortical Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW). It further correlates with access to working memory. The review also gives a great account of the epistemic status of the major claims in the book. It reviews the evidence from several experiments discussed in the book itself. The review also goes beyond this, discussing the epistemic status of those experiments (e.g. in light of the replication crisis in psychology).
So kudos to both the book author and the review author. A decent follow-up would be to link these findings to the larger lesswrong agenda (although I note this review is part of a larger sequence that includes additional nominations).