The Mystery

Integrated information theory (IIT) attempts to provide a framework capable of explaining why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious, why they feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky), and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious (are dogs conscious? what about unborn babies? or computers?). In principle, once the theory is mature and has been tested extensively in controlled conditions, the IIT framework may be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree it is conscious, and what particular experience it is having. In IIT, a system's consciousness (what it is like subjectively) is conjectured to be identical to its causal properties (what it is like objectively). Therefore it should be possible to account for the conscious experience of a physical system by unfolding its complete causal powe

Self-knowledge, or the learning about yourself every day, brings about a new mind. You have denied the old mind. Through self-knowledge, you have denied your conditioning totally. The conditioning of the mind can be denied only when the mind is aware of its operations, how it works, what it thinks, what it says, its motives. There is another factor involved. We think it is a gradual process, that it will take time to free the mind from conditioning. We think that it will take days or years to uncondition our conditioned mind, gradually, day after day. This implies acquiring knowledge in order to dissipate conditioning, which means you are not learning but acquiring. A mind that is acquiring is not learning. A mind that uses knowledge to achieve a sense of liberation must have time. Such a mind thinks it must have time to free itself from its conditioning, which means it is going to acquire knowledge, and as the knowledge expands, it will become freer and freer. This is utterly false. T

I wonder what we mean by conditioning. Is it the tradition, not only present day tradition, but centuries and centuries of tradition that has been handed down from generation to generation, and is this conditioning the whole background of civilization, culture, the social impacts and the many, many experiences that one has? Does all this contribute to the conditioning of the brain? Not only all this but also the various impressions, the propaganda, the literature, the television, all this seems to add to the background, to the conditioning of every human being, whether he is very, very, very poor, uneducated, most primitive, and to the most highly educated, sophisticated human beings. This conditioning seems to be inevitable. It has been a factor that has endured probably for a million years, or fifty thousand years. If all that is the conditioning, or the background of every human being, and that obviously shapes our thinking, controls our reactions and responses, and our way of behav

Metaphor is the language of the REM state. French scientist Michel Jouvet suggested that REM sleep is concerned with programming the central nervous system to carry out instinctive behaviours. William Dement and colleagues discovered that the amount of REM sleep a foetus or newborn has depends on how mature an animal is at birth. Animals born relatively mature have little REM sleep as foetuses and after birth, while animals born immature have a considerable amount. During REM sleep, foetuses and newborns are programmed with the instincts that they must seek to complete in the environment. As the sense organs start to receive inputs from the environment, the brain ‘pattern matches’ to the instinctive templates programmed in during REM sleep. According to the theory, just as programming instincts involves creating a pattern or template for which an analogue can be found in the environment (twig-like materials, a friendly human face, etc.), so it makes sense that deactivation also uses se