I’ve had a longer-than-usual hiatus from posting due to adding a new living arrangement to our small collection. Acquiring and moving furniture, appliances, toiletries, bedding, audio equipment, and cleaning supplies between spaces has an almost unlimited ability to distract. And when a quiet final settles in, there remains a restlessness about optimizing experiences and priorities that takes time to psychically draw down. It’s the clattering opposite of focusmaxxing. On the positive, new places constantly reset and tune expectations about what is important and what matters little in a life, with people, ideas, and new experiences always rising above the glimmer of these damn possessions.

This rich inner life, this sense of a self that powers the great religions and mystical traditions of the world, this atma and soul, these ideas of impermanence, justice, and wonder—can they all be a product of a versatile connective matrix that computes these optimizing decisions while simultaneously creating a vital subjective sense of identity? There is a theory called unlimited associational learning (UAL) that posits exactly that. Our adaptation to the world is one of temporal superiority. A plan and a reaction for a conscience entity is a function for pulling time apart and predicting the future, from the cause-effect of seasonal migrations of herd animals to estimating the supportive and defensive capabilities of mates.

The essential hinge is that this consciousness, this sense of being someone, must on average be more effective than the other trajectories through the phylogenetic, epigenetic, and ontogenetic state spaces. And that’s even with all the flaws like misperceptions, biases, neurological injuries, and schizophrenia. Proving this with any sort of mathematical precision has an almost impossible bar to meet since it would require that a model first is shown to be conscious with the set of UAL-sufficient hallmarks, like global accessibility, integration over time, agency and embodiment, and so on.… Read the rest