Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy
I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchronize for particular tasks, or just figuring out what exactly are those "tasks", the basic computational primitives of adaptation in "lower" animals and insects, let alone humans.<p>While scientific reductionism has its limitations (e.g. trying to fully describe the complexity of a single neuron in c.elegans is sort of a rabbit hole) you still have to understand at least some of the basic  mechanisms, the "LEGO  blocks" of cognition, before talking about such higher level of abstraction, especially when it's so ill-defined.<p>I think Feynman' definition of "cargo cult science" is appropriate here, where we are trying to explain our perception of reality via superficial "neural correlates", or attaching to it these arbitrary "complexity theories", etc., without understanding the fundamental driving factors, mechanics and constraints of perception, the "why" and "how" first.