Consciousness is informative in the sense that every experience is different from every other experience you have ever had, or ever could have. Looking past the desk in front of me through the window beyond, I have never before experienced precisely this configuration of coffee cups, computers and clouds – an experience that is even more distinctive when combined with all the other perceptions, emotions and thoughts simultaneously present. Every conscious experience involves a very large reduction of uncertainty – at any time, we have one experience out of vastly many possible experiences – and reduction of uncertainty is what mathematically we mean by ‘information’.
Consciousness is integrated in the sense that every conscious experience appears as a unified scene. We do not experience colours separately from their shapes, nor objects independently of their background. The many different elements of my conscious experience right now – computers and coffee cups, as well as the gentle sounds of Bach and my worries about what to write next – seem tied together in a deep way, as aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness.
A very large reduction of uncertainty is another aspect of Karl Friston’s idea that we navigate through life by avoiding surprises. Looking at it more widely, it also seems to be one of the great divides. Some people are pragmatic enough to understand how embracing uncertainty can be the best route to greater certainty. It is not even a paradox because we can be certain that something is uncertain.
Others seem to need the more immediate and lasting certainties of ideology and dogma, even at the expense of honesty, personal integrity and even outright silliness. Fake news propaganda is itself a dishonest evasion of a much deeper problem that is fake certainty.
2 comments:
I occasionally mutter that I must make a 'conscious effort', to achieve something, be it making a person happier, trying to get something to work better etc, but what I'm probably doing, is making the action fit the objective, not the other way round.
Interesting topic!
Scrobs - it's surprising how unconscious effort works better than conscious effort. Mow the lawn while thinking of other things and the job is easy but keep looking at how much is left to do and it isn't so easy.
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