'The map is real...'

Suppose you have a city map. It’s definitely useful. Without it, you might never reach your goal. Is the map a perfect rendering of the city? No. There is no such thing as a two-dimensional, black-and-white city filled with perfectly straight paths and neat angles. But the city itself is real, the map is real, the information in it is mostly valid if simplified, and so the map is unquestionably of practical use. Knowing all this, you probably won’t suffer an existential crisis over the reality of the city or dismiss the contents or the existence of the map as an illusion. The truth is much simpler: your model of the city is helpful but not perfectly accurate.

Build a Brain - Is consciousness and engineering problem? Michael Graziano


Image: Eric Fisher

A physical impossibility

White light contains a mixture of all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. It is the dirtiest, muddiest color possible. But the visual system does not model it in that way. Instead, the visual system encodes the information of high brightness and low color. That is the brain’s model of white light— a high value of brightness and a low value of color, a purity of luminance— a physical impossibility.

Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael Graziano

Image from here

Mind and matter

Nobody has yet properly defined mind and no one has explained properly how so-called ethereal thought can change so-called material structure.   The whole subject is filled with wonder.

— Norman Doidge.   But for Michael Graziano, there is no hard problem:

There is only the question of how the brain, an information processing device, concludes and insists it has consciousness.

Image: Roden Crater, James Turrell