Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

I agree.

Within the "metaconsiousness" definition provided int he article, I think it very likely that the distinction is more of an illusion than anything else.

attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought

Say we're learning to operate a car... You are very "aware" of steering and pedals and gears. After a while, you start just thinking in terms of forward, this way, stop, faster. The mechanics start to be handled "subconsiously"^ as you go along. Awareness/attention then gets drawn back if something goes wrong, say your gear sticks. A lot of learning seems to be like this. Aware & consious actions repeated until it becomes subconsious. I think this process is gradual. More importantly, the observable outputs are very hard to stack neatly into two piles.

On top of that we have the problem of fooling ourselves. If I asked you "why did you change lanes?" you will probably give me an answer, but a lot of expirements suggest that answer is made up after the fact.

I think it's more likely that metaconsiousness is made of the same stuff as subconsiousness. It's just the type of consiousness that we notice (tautology?) and consider to be us.

TLDR, I agree that the more important breakthroughs will probably be at the worm consiousness level, but that is itself a theory of consiousness.

^As mentioned below, it's a problem using, defining and speculating about these terms simultaneously. I'm doing it anyway, but yeah...

There are species of ants that can pass the mirror test.

It already happened then. https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/25/deepmind-create-ai-imagi...

AI makes predictions and acts on them.

>This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself

I think this trend is bound up inextricably with our efforts to distinguish ourselves from "lesser" animals. A monkey may be able to reason intelligently, but it cannot communicate to us whether it is aware of itself doing so. We therefore lack evidence of meta-consciousness in animals and tend to attach out-sized significance to it as a potential mark of human superiority. Even though absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness seems to derive from the same mental equipment pre-human hominids developed for handling social interactions. The ability to model and predict the mental states of other hominids provided a survival advantage. Once sufficiently developed, this ability can be applied to itself, so that the hominid is modeling its own thought processes and mental states.

To me, this doesn't seem like some sort of deeper, insoluble mystery, but rather the symptom of an unsatisfactorily detailed model of that mental equipment. I think the problem loses its peculiar appeal when we can identify with a reasonable degree of certainty that what we experience as consciousness corresponds to specific neural pathways and configurations. Right now, the philosophical arguments are too abstract to be convincing and the science is too immature to discourage all the useless theorizing.

Temperature is defined as 1/T = dS/dU, where U is the energy of the system and S is the entropy of the system, i.e. S = k * ln(#states that have energy U)

The temperature is proportional to the energy of the system only for ideal monoatomic gases. (Ideal diatomic gases, are slightly more complicated.)

So a "hot" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving in random directions has a different temperature than a "fast" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving roughly in the same direction. It doesn't matter how difficult is to define it. (Probably you can use an infrared thermometer pointed in the direction perpendicular to the movement to get the correct temperature.)

In the fast balloon you can theoretically split the energy in A: kinetic energy of the center of mass and B: internal thermal energy, so the total energy is A+B. With some device you can extract all the kinetic energy as something useful. (for example, make the balloon hit some lever connected to an electric generator, you will need something more smarter to get the 100% of A but it's theoretically possible.) So you can extract the 100% of A

If the hot balloon with the same energy you have only A+B of internal thermal energy. If you use some device you can never extract the energy, you can never extract more than a part of B as something useful like electricity, because of the second law of thermodynamics. It the ambient temperature is T_amb and the initial temperature of the balloon is T_bal, you can get at most B * (1 - T_amb / T_bal) as something usefull like electricity and waste at least B * (T_amb / T_bal) in a heat sink.