Jed McCaleb

How does matter become bright inside? I am deeply excited to share our vision @AsteraNeuro for understanding and engineering consciousness. We believe that perception and thought are constructed from fundamental building blocks, and that by understanding these blocks and how the brain combines them, we can explain the whole mystery of consciousness. Writing this vision statement helped me think more clearly about questions that have long bothered me: Why did consciousness evolve? What are we actually conscious of? What is the self? How do different parts of the brain work together? How can we tell whether an AI is conscious? What scientific path can lead to real answers? Part 1 presents a new theory. I propose that conscious experience arises from a coherent internal model of the world and the self built from 'persistent symbols.' I describe the neural representations and dynamics through which the brain could implement such symbols. Part 2 lays out a roadmap to systematically discover the basic building blocks of perception, cognition, and the self-model, and to build the neural read/write technologies and org culture we need to get there. Part 3 presents a dream: What will become possible once we acquire the ability to read and write experience--to truly engineer consciousness? If you are a systems neuroscientist who feels something fundamental is missing from our field, I share this feeling. Understanding the phenomenon that compelled many of us to become neuroscientists in the first place should be a central organizing goal of our field. This vision statement lays out a research program to reach this goal. If you read the vision statement and recognize that this is the mission you have been longing for, please get in touch, wherever in life you are right now. I made this stone soup for you. astera.org/understanding-and…

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)