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**Victoria Stuart** @persagen · Jul 9, 2023 *

Jul 9, 2023 *

What Is the Nature of Consciousness?
Consciousness is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-nature-of-consciousness-20230531/

@anilkseth

An interesting interview, ~35 minute careful read.

The section starting at 19:44 (see also 34:00) is relevant to machine learning (in fact, the basis of neural network training).
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Quanta MagazineWhat Is the Nature of Consciousness? | Quanta MagazineConsciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon.

**Victoria Stuart** @persagen · Jul 9, 2023

Jul 9, 2023

Victoria Stuart @persagen

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"the sensory signals, they’re just reporting what we call prediction errors, the difference between what the brain is expecting and what it’s getting at every level of processing"

While "attention" is not mentioned, attentional models are the basis of computational "transformer" machine learning (includes NLP, a subset of ML) models such as GPT3, GPT4, ChatGPT ...
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**Victoria Stuart** @persagen · Jul 9, 2023 *

Jul 9, 2023 *

Victoria Stuart @persagen

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Relevant to the interview, our visual perception is confined to a narrow attentional window, discussed ~7:00+ in NOVA S50E09 Your Brain Perception Deception (2023-05-17).

https://thepiratebay0.org/search/NOVA%20S50E09/1/99/0

Also mentioned in the interview, "the dress" is discussed at ~14' into that NOVA documentary.
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thepiratebay0.orgThe Pirate Bay - The galaxy's most resilient bittorrent siteSearch for and download any torrent from the pirate bay using search query NOVA S50E09. Direct download via magnet link.

**Victoria Stuart** @persagen · Jul 9, 2023

Jul 9, 2023

Victoria Stuart @persagen

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I am a devotee of mathematical modeling in all forms (includes ML), including mathematical modeling of consciousness. In this regard, I am also a proponent of Karl Friston & his "free energy principle," which addresses many of the points in the interview.

I am also a huge admirer of Gottfried Leibniz, whose ideas - centuries on - are germane and continue to influence epistemology, intelligence, consciousness, graph theory and machine learning.

Links

The dress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
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en.wikipedia.orgThe dress - Wikipedia