Is Nestedness a Rare Kind of Thing in the Space of All Systems?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The existence of higher level descriptions that are as good at predicting what will happen next as you can be without microscopic information. Is probably very unlikely if you just picked randomly, you know, how to hat a coarse grain in some sense. But then the real world is not. And so quite how rare these things are in the world as it is,. is much to make a strong statement about.

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Anil Seth received his D.Phil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex. He is currently a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at Sussex, as well as co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has served as the president of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. His new book is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.