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– Google political targeting
Google’s Polical Ad. Targeting, Democracy and Randomness
Google announced on Wednesday (20/11/19) that it was no longer going to allow political candidates to target their advertisements to individuals. Instead Google will restrict the targeting to age, gender and location.
But does this go far enough? During the 1990s I worked on software for modelling user characteristics and using these to determine the content that was delivered to them. This was primarily for computer-assisted learning. The models would identify the level of knowledge a student had in a particular subject and then deliver material appropriate to that level. Some of these programs were even considered by the space industry to guide and train astronauts on the space station.
However, while there might be arguments that these systems are useful in education, it is far more questionable as to whether they contribute anything to the political process. It seems to me that in a democratic society, everybody should have access to exactly the same information and that it should not even be targeted by age, gender or even location. What are the arguments for this?
If information is targeted on the basis of my demographic characteristics, then I am leaving it to the politicians to decide what I should hear and not my own judgement about what is important to attend to. All targeting takes away my right to see what other people might be concerned about. It confines me to my own information bubble. It restricts my knowledge of what is going on in other parts of the community, and puts me at a disadvantage in being able to interact with a diversity of opinion. It compromises my autonomy.
I believe that we all have the right to not only consider our own situations but to make political decisions that relate to others. I may be well healed but still concerned for the plight of the poor, or I may be at a disadvantage in society and still concerned about how the better advantaged manage their affairs. I may be female but still have opinions about men. I may be a child but still have opinions about the way adults are dealing with climate change, for example. I may live in London and still be concerned about what is happening in the north. If information is targeted on the basis of my demographic characteristics, then I am leaving it to the politicians to decide what I should hear and not my own judgement about what is important to attend to.
As somebody once said, ‘in a world where everything is connected to everything else, it is difficult to see what matters’. Targeting restricts my view of a complicated information ecosystem and restricts me to acting locally on the basis of limited information. It takes away my capacity to see the bigger picture.
Much the same argument can be applied to the way that Parliament is currently constituted. The so-called ‘representative democracy’ is a system in which only certain people have access to the political decision-making process. These people are either self selected or selected by their parties. One way or another, they are in no way representative of the population at large. A truly representative system would select 650 MPs at random from the entire UK population. These people would then truly reflect a widely varying set of circumstances and concerns amongst the people at large. I am not necessarily saying that this is a good idea. There are many snags and it would be necessary to provide high levels of training and support (e.g. in the issues of the day and in the political process) for such a system to be effective. What I am saying is that it would be more representative and more democratic.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I tend to have faith in random processes. Would it not be fairer for all kinds of selection to be random. For example, in job selection, is it really necessary to do any vetting beyond having qualifications for the job. If having established that baseline capability, all vacancies were filled at random, then there would be far greater equality of opportunity, diversity and social mobility. It would also save a lot of time in managing the selection process and then correcting it with processes to avoid discrimination.
Selection is partly a process in which new power relations and obligations are created between those that select and those that are selected. However, somehow one doubts that the individuals that currently hold the power, would be prepared to give it up.
I tend to discount arguments that those that currently hold power are there because they deserve it. Some do, there is no doubt. But many don’t and that is divisive for the whole system. We are all aware that opportunity favours the circumstances of birth. I suppose we could argue that this itself is something of a random process, and perhaps that is why we do not question the status quo. However it is only random at a single point in time and from that point a person’s birth circumstance has an overwhelming influence.
So, I would argue against the power to target messages to anybody in particular. If there has to be any basis for selection at all (e.g. on the grounds of costs), I would argue for the random scattering of identical messages amongst the population.
A policy not to ‘fact-check’ what politicians say in their advertisements is another matter. I am not sure why the advertising standards authority principles cannot apply to politicians in the same way as it applies to the advertising of products and services. Google’s policies, are at least, going in the right direction. They say they will identify ‘clear violations’ by putting in place checks on blatantly fake news and ‘deep fakes’. They also promise transparency with respect to who is placing and seeing advertisements. Really, we might be better continuing our scrutiny of Facebook who, until very recently, have not thought it necessary to put significant controls on either targeting or the fact checking of content.
I do have some sympathy for the argument that we should not leave it to commercial companies to be making editorial decisions. Indeed, they are political decisions that need to be taken at the level of society generally. However while society and its regulatory controls are so slow to act, we are dependent on these companies to exercise controls that we hope will, in retrospect, withstand public scrutiny.
– Autonomy now
Making sense of a changing world
It’s difficult to make sense of a fast changing world. But could ‘autonomy’ be at the centre of it? I’ll explain.
There are two main themes – people and technology. Ideas about autonomy are changing for both. For people, it is a matter of their relationship to employment, government and the many institutions of society. For technology, it is the introduction of autonomous intelligence in a wide range of systems including phone apps and all manner of automated decision making systems that affect every aspect of our lives. There is also the increasing inter-dependency between people and technology, both empowering and constraining. Questions of autonomy are at the heart of these changes.
There have been times in history when it has not occurred to people that they could be autonomous in the broad scope of their lives. They were born into a time and place where the control of their destiny was not their own concern. They were conditioned to know their place, accept it and stay in it. In first world democracies, autonomy is, perhaps, a luxury of the here and now. It may not necessarily stay that way.
My particular interest is the way in which we are giving autonomy to the things that we create – computer algorithms, artificial intelligence systems and robots. But it’s broader than that. We all want the freedom to pursue our own goals, to self-determine. We are told repeatedly by an industry concerned with self-development and achieving success, that we should ‘find our authentic self’ and pursue the values and goals that really matter to us.
However, we can only do this within an environment of constraints – physical constraints, resource constraints, psychological constraints and social constraints. It is the dynamic between the individual and their constraints that is in constant flux and that I am trying to examine.
What’s Trending in Autonomy?
There are two main trends – one towards decentralisation and one towards concentrations of wealth and power. This seems something of a contradiction. How can both be true and, if so, where is this going?
There is a long-term trend towards decentralization. First we rejected the ancient gods as the controllers of nature. Much more recently we have started to question other sources of authority – governments, doctors, the church, the law, the mainstream media and many other institutions in society. As we as individuals have become more informed and empowered by technology, we have started to see the flaws in these ‘authorities’.
I believe, along with many other commentators, that we are heading towards a world where autonomy is not just highly valued but is also more possible than it ever has been. As society becomes better educated, as technology enables greater information sharing and flexibility, we can, and perhaps inevitably will, move towards a more decentralized society in which both human and artificial autonomous agents increasingly interact with each other. The interactions will become more frequent, more informed, more fine-grained and more local. The technological infrastructure for this continues to rollout at ever-increasing pace. Soon we will have 5G communications facilitating almost instantaneous communications between ever more intelligent and powerful devices – smart phones, autonomous vehicles, information servers, and a host of smart devices.
On the other hand, there is clear evidence of increased concentrations of wealth and power. Although estimates may vary, it seems that a greater proportion of the worlds wealth is held by fewer and fewer people. Stories abound of fewer that eight people owning more than half the worlds wealth. Economists like Thomas Pickerty have documented in detail the evidence for such a trend.
There is clearly a tension between these trends. As power and wealth become more concentrated, manifesting in the form of surveillance capitalism (not ignoring surveillance by the state) and fake news, there is a fight back by individuals and other institutions.
Individuals increasingly recognise the intrusions on their privacy and this is picked up (often belatedly) in legislation like GDPR and other moves to regulate. The checks and balances do work to modulate the dynamics of the struggle, but when they don’t work, the accumulated frustration at the loss of human dignity can become political and violent. Take a closer look at autonomy.
Why do we need Autonomy?
We each have a biological imperative to survive. While we can count on others to some extent, ‘the buck stops’ with each of us as individuals. The more robust and resilient solutions are self-sufficiency and self-determination. It’s not a fail-safe but it takes out the risk that others might not be there for us all the time. It also appears to be a route to greater wellbeing. Learning, developing competence and mastery, being able to predict and hence increase the possibility that we can control, being less subject to constraints on our actions – all contribute to satisfaction, ultimately in the service of survival.
In the hierarchy of needs, having enough food, shelter, sleep and security releases some of your own resources. It provides the freedom to climb. Somewhere near the top of the hierarchy is what Maslow called self-actualisation – the discovery and expression of your authentic self. But unless you are exceptionally lucky, and find that your circumstances align perfectly with your authentic self, then a pre-requisite is to have freedom from the constraints that prevent you from getting there.
Interactions between people and machines
This is all the human side of autonomy – the bit that applies to us all. This is a world in which both people and artificial agents – computer algorithms, smart devices, robots etc. interact with each other. Interactions between people and people, machines and machines and people and machines are accelerating in both speed and frequency in order that each autonomous agent can achieve its own rapidly changing priorities and goals. There is nothing static or certain in this world. It is changing, ambiguous, and unpredictable.
Different autonomous agents have different goals and different value systems that drive them. For people these are different cultures, social norms and roles. For machines they relate to their different functions and circumstances in which they operate. For interactions to work smoothly there needs to be some stability in the protocols that regulate them. Autonomy may be a way into defining accountability and responsibility. It may lead us towards mechanisms for the justification and explanation of action. Neither machines nor people are very good at this, but autonomy may provide the key that unlocks our understanding of effective communication and protocols.
Still, that’s for later. Right now, this article is just focused on the concept of autonomy.
I hope you are convinced that this is an important and interesting subject. It is at the foundation of our relationships with each other and between people and the increasingly autonomous and intelligent agents we are creating.
Questions that need to be addressed
- What do we mean by autonomy?
- How do agents (people and machines) differ in the amount of autonomy they have?
- Can we measure autonomy?
- What examples of peoples societies and artefacts can we think of that might help us understand what is it what is not autonomous?
- What do we mean by autonomy when we talk about artificial autonomous intelligence systems?
- Are the computer algorithms and robotic systems that we have today truly autonomous?
- What would it mean to build an artificial intelligence that was truly autonomous?
- What is the relationship between autonomy and morality?
- Can we be truly autonomous if we are constrained by ethical principles and social norms?
- If we want our intelligent artefacts to behave ethically, then how would we approach the design of those systems?
That’s quite a chunk of questions to get through. But they are all on the critical path to understanding how our own human autonomy and the autonomy that we build into artefacts, can relate to and engage with each other. They take us to a point where we can better understand the trade-offs every intelligent agent, be it human or artificial, has to make between the freedom to pursue its own goals and the constraints of living in a society of other intelligent agents.
It also reveals how, in people, the constraints of society are internalised. As adults they have become part of our internal control mechanisms. These internal controls have no absolute morality but reflect the circumstances and society in which we grow up. As our artefacts become increasingly intelligent we may need to develop similar mechanisms for their socialisation.
Definitions of Autonomy
The following definitions are taken from the glossary of the IEEE publication called ‘Ethically Aligned Design’ (version 1). The glossary has several definitions from different perspectives:
Ordinary language: The ability of a person or artefact to govern itself including formation of intentions, goals, motivations, plans of action, and execution of those plans, with or without the assistance of other persons or systems.
Engineering: “Where an agent acts autonomously, it is not possible to hold any one else responsible for its actions. In so far as the agent’s actions were its own and stemmed from its own ends, others cannot be held responsible for them” (Sparrow 2007, 63).
Government: “we define local [government] autonomy conceptually as a system of local government in which local government units have an important role to play in the economy and the intergovernmental system, have discretion in determining what they will do without undue constraint from higher levels of government, and have the means or capacity to do so” (Wolman et al 2008, 4-5).
Ethics and Philosophy: “Put most simply, to be autonomous is to be one’s own person, to be directed by considerations, desires, conditions, and characteristics that are not simply imposed externally upon one, but are part of what can somehow be considered one’s authentic self” (Christman 2015).
Medical: “Two conditions are ordinarily required before a decision can be regarded as autonomous. The individual has to have the relevant internal capacities for self-government and has to be free from external constraints. In a medical context a decision is ordinarily regarded as autonomous where the individual has the capacity to make the relevant decision, has sufficient information to make the decision and does so voluntarily” (British Medical Association 2016).
More on autonomy later. Sign up to the blog if you want to be notified.
Meanwhile a couple of videos
The first has an interesting take on autonomy. Autonomy is not a matter of what you want, but what you want to want. The more reflective you are about what you want the more autonomous you are.
Youtube Video, What is Autonomy? (Personal and Political), Carneades.org, December 2018, 6:50 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0uylpfirfM
The second is from a relatively new Youtube channel called ‘Rebel Wisdom’. It starts with the breakdown of trust in traditional media and moves on to themes of decentralisation.
Youtube Video, The War on Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Rebel Wisdom, August 2019, 1:48:49 hours
– Are we free?
Consciousness, freedom and moral responsibility
Answering the question ‘Are we free?’ at the level of society suggests that the big multi-nationals have assumed control over many aspects of our lives (see: “What is control?”). Answering the same question at the level of the individual is much more difficult. It raises some profound philosophical questions to do with consciousness, freewill and moral responsibility. In considering issues of moral responsibility it is worth first examining ideas about the nature of consciousness and freewill.
There are legal definitions of responsibility and culpability that can vary from one legislative system to another. There are definitions within moral philosophy (e.g. Kant’s Categorical Imperative). There are mental health definitions that aim to ascertain whether a person has ‘mental capacity’. However, it is generally accepted that to have moral responsibility people need to consciously exercise freewill over the choices they make. Moral responsibility entails having freewill, and for people, freewill entails a self-determined and deliberate conscious decision.
Consciousness
John Searle regards consciousness as an emergent property of biological processes. There are no contradictions between materialistic, mentalistic and spiritual accounts. They are just different levels of description of the same phenomena. Consciousness is to neuroscience as liquid is to the chemistry of H2O. There is no mind / body problem – mind and body are again just different levels of description. It’s linguistic usage that confuses us. Consciousness does confer meaning onto things but that does not imply that subjective reality cannot be studied using objective methods.
YouTube Video, John Searle: Our shared condition — consciousness, TED, July 2013, 14:59 minutes
David Chalmers addresses head on the question of why we have conscious subjective experience and how reductionist explanations fail to provide answers. He suggests that consciousness could be one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe like space, time, and mass. He suggests the possibility that all information processing systems, whether they are ‘alive’ or not may have some degree of consciousness.
TED Video, David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness?, Big Think, March 2014, 18:37 minutes
The view that degree of consciousness might correlate with how much a system is able to process information is set out in more detail in the following:
YouTube Video, Michio Kaku: Consciousness Can be Quantified, Big Think, March 2014, 4:45 minutes
Building on the idea that consciousness involves feedback, John Dunne from the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, looks at self-reflexivity as practiced in many religions, and in mindfulness. Consciousness confers the capacity to report on the object of experience (Is ‘I think therefore I am’ a reported reflection on something we all take for granted?).
YouTube Video, WPT University Place: Consciousness, Reflexivity and Subjectivity, Wisconsin Public Television, March 2016, 40:17 minutes
The BBC have put together a short documentary on consciousness as part of its series called ‘The Story of Now’. Progress has been made in consciousness research over the last 20 years including in the measurement of consciousness and understanding some mental conditions s disorders of consciousness.
BBC, The Story of Now – Consciousness, February 2015, About 15 minutes
https://vimeo.com/107828461
Susan Greenfield, addressing an audience of neuroscientists, says consciousness cannot be defined but suggests a working definition of consciousness as the ‘first person subjective world as it seems to you’. She distinguishes between consciousness, self-consciousness, unconsciousness and sub-consciousness. She considers boundaries such as ‘when does a baby become conscious?’, ‘are animals conscious?’, ‘what happens between being asleep or awake?’. Having ‘degrees of consciousness‘ seems to make sense and locates consciousness in transient (sub-second duration), variable ‘neural assemblies’ that have epicentres – like a stone creating ripples when thrown in a pond. The stone might be a strong stimulus (like an alarm clock) which interacts with learned connections in the brain formulated during your life experience, modulated by chemical ‘fountains’ that affect neural transmission. Depression involves a disruption to the chemical fountains and the experience of pain is dependent on the size of the active neuronal assembly. Consciousness is manifested when the activation of the neural assemblies is communicated to the rest of the brain and body. Sub-consiousness arises out of assemblies that are, in some sense, too small.
YouTube Video, The Neuroscience of Consciousness – Susan Greenfield, The University of Melbourne, November 2012, 1:34:17 hours
Some of the latest research on where in the brain consciousness seems to manifest can be found at:
Big Think Article, Harvard Researchers Have Found the Source of Human Consciousness, Phil Perry, January 2017
http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/harvard-researchers-have-found-the-source-of-human-consciousness?
Prof. Raymond Tallis, however, has some issues with reductionists theories that seek to explain humankind in biological terms and attacks the trend towards what he calls neuromania. He also rejects mystical and theological explanations and, while not embracing dualism, argues that we have to use the language of mind and society if we are to further our understanding.
YouTube Video, Prof. Raymond Tallis – “Aping Mankind? Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity”, IanRamseyCentre, December 2012, 18:16 minutes
Freewill
YouTube Video, David Eagleman: Brain over mind?, pop tech, April 2013, 22:25 minutes
Here is a radio introduction:
BBC Radio 4, Neuroscientist Pauls Broks on Freewill and the Brain, November 2014, 11 minutes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04p2bcz
Pinker thinks that our freewill arises out of the complexity of the brain and that there is no reason to postulate any non-mechanical entity such as the soul. He distinguishes automatic responses (such as pupil dilation) from those that are based on mental models and can anticipate possible consequences which are sufficient to account for freewill.
YouTube Video, Steven Pinker: On Free Will, Big Think, June 2011, 2:17 minutes
Alfred Mele speculates on their being different grades of freewill and throws doubt on experiments which claim to show that decisions are made prior to our becoming consciously aware of them.
YouTube Video, Does Free Will Exist – Alfred Mele, Big Think, April 2012, 15:10 minutes
Is consciousness necessary for freewill? Do we make decisions while we are not consciously aware of them? If we do, then does that mean that we are not exercising freewill? If we are not exercising freewill then does that mean we have no moral responsibility for our decisions?
According to Denett, consciousness is nothing special. We only think its special because we associate it with freewill. However, the only freewill that matters is the responsibility for our actions that biology has given us through mental competence. The competence to reflect on our own thoughts and those of others, to anticipate consequences of our actions, and to see and evaluate the consequences, gives us both freewill and a responsibility for our actions.
YouTube Video, Daniel Dennett Explains Consciousness and Free Will, Big Think, April 2012, 6:33 minutes
Freewill and moral responsibility
Where do we draw the line between behaviour that we explain as driven by neurological/ neuro-chemical factors and those we explain in psychological, disease and demonic terms? Professor Robert Sapolsky shows how behaviours that were once explained as demonic are now explained neurologically. This parallels a shift from believing that the locus of control of peoples’ (unusual and other) behaviour has moved from demons and gods, to people, to disease, to brain structures and chemistry. What does this say about our sense of autonomy, individuality and ability to create moral positions?
Youtube video, 25. Individual Differences, Stanford, February 2011, 53:53 minutes
Assuming that we do have choice then this brings with it moral responsibility for our actions. But moral responsibility according to which system of values? Sam Harris argues that we take an odd stance when considering moral questions. In general we are willing to accept that different people are entitled to take different stands on moral questions and that there are no right or wrong answers. We tend to leave moral judgements to religions and are prepared to accept that in principle any moral value system could be right and therefore we cannot criticise any. However, Sam Harris points out that we do not do this in other domains. In health, for example, we are prepared to say that good health is better than bad health and than certain things lead to good health and should be encouraged while other don’t and should be discouraged. By the same token, if we accept that certain moral choices lead towards enhanced wellbeing (in others and ourselves) while other choices lead to pain and suffering then the normal application of scientific method can inform us about moral decisions (and we can abandon religious dogma).
TED Video, Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions, TED, March 2010, 23:34 minutes
Peter Millican discusses the relationship between freewill, determinism and moral responsibility. He describes Hume’s notion of responsibility, how ideas of right and wrong arise out of our feelings, and how this is independent of whether an act was determined or not. However, our feelings can often be in conflict with lower order feelings (the desire to smoke) constraining higher order feelings (wanting to give up smoking) and that our higher order freewill can therefore be constrained, giving us ‘degrees of freewill’ in relation to particular circumstances.
YouTube Video, 7.4 Making Sense of Free Will and Moral Responsibility – Peter Millican, Oxford, April 2011, 9:48 minutes
Corey Anton sets out a philosophical position – there is ‘motion without motivation’ and ‘motion with motivation’. We call ‘motion with motivation’ ‘action’. Some motivations result from being pushed along by the past (x did y because of some past event or experience) and some motivations are driven by the future (x did y in order to). Freewill is more typically associated with actions motivated by the intention to bring about future states.
YouTube Video, The Motives of Questioning Free Will, Corey Anton, 8:12 minutes
Intentionality and Theory of Mind
If it is our ability to reflect on our own perceptions and thoughts that gives us the capacity to make decisions, then, in the social world, we must also consider our capacity to reflect on other people’s perceptions and thoughts. This creates a whole new order of complexity and opportunity for misunderstanding and feeling misunderstood (whether we are or not). Watch the video below or get the full paper.
YouTube Video, Comprehending Orders of Intentionality (for R. D. Laing), Corey Anton, September 2014, 31:31 minutes
How do our ideas about other people’s intentions affect our moral judgements about them, and what is going on in the brain when we make moral judgements? Liane Young highlights the extent to which our view about a person’s intentions influences our judgements with respect to the outcomes of their actions, and goes on to described the brain area in which these moral evaluations appear to be taking place.
TED Video, TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht – Liane Young – The Brain on Intention, TEDx Talks, January 2012, 14:34 minutes
Summary
Even though we may not have a definitive answer to the question ‘Are we free?’, we can say some things about it that may affect the way we think.
- We cannot say definitively whether the world is pre-determined in the sense that every state of the universe at any one time could not have been otherwise. This partly arises out of our ignorance about physics and whether in some sense there is an inherent lack of causality.
- If the universe does obey causal laws then that does not mean that the state of the universe would be necessarily knowable.
- Whether or not the universe is knowably pre-determined is independent of our subjective feelings of consciousness and freewill. We behave as if we have freewill, we assume others are conscious sentient beings with freewill and the moral responsibility that arises out of this.
- However, within this framework there are acknowledged limitations on freewill, degrees of consciousness and consequently degrees of moral responsibility.
- These limitations and degrees arise in numerous ways including our own resources, imagination and capacity for reflections (self-consciousness), cognitive biases and controlling factors (including our own genetics, families, cultures, organisations and governments) that either subconsciously or consciously constrain our options and freedom to make choices.
- There could be a correlation between degree of consciousness and the integrated information processing capacity of a system, perhaps even regardless of whether that system is regarded as ‘alive’.
- Wellbeing seems to be enhanced by the feeling that we have the freedom to control our own destiny whether or not this freedom is an illusion.
- The more we find out about psychology, the mind and the brain, the more it looks as if we can explain and predict our actions and choices more accurately by an appeal to science than an appeal to our own intuitions.
- Our intuitions seem largely based on the pragmatic need to survive and deal effectively with threat within our limited resources. They are not inherently geared to finding the ‘truth’ or accurately modelling reality unless it has payoff in terms of survival.
- Some of our behaviour is ‘automatic’, either driven by physiology or by learning. Other behaviour is mediated by consulting internal states such as our interpretations and models of reality, and testing possible outcomes against these models as opposed to against reality itself.
- Our internal models can include models of our own states (e.g. when we anticipate how we might feel given a future set of circumstances and thereby re-evaluate our options).
- Our internal models can include speculations on the models and motivations of other people, organisations, other sentient beings and even inanimate objects (e.g. I’ll pretend I do not know that he is thinking that I will deceive him). Anything, in fact, can be the content of our models.
- We associate freedom with our capacity to have higher levels of reflection, and we attribute greater moral responsibility to those who we perceive to have greater freedom.
- We evaluate the moral culpability of others in terms of their intentions and have specialised areas in the brain where these evaluations are made.
- We evaluate the morality of a choice against some value system. Science offers a value system that we are prepared to accept in other domains, such as health. As in health there are clearly some actions that enhance wellbeing and others that do not. If we accept science as a method to assess the effects on wellbeing of particular moral choices, rather than use our fallible intuitions or religious dogma, then we can move forward in the achievement of greater wellbeing.
- Even if we could ascertain whether and how we are conscious and free, the ultimate question of ‘why?’ looks impossible to resolve.
Given the multitude of factors from physiology to society that control or at least constrain our decisions (and our speculations about them), it is no wonder that human behaviour appears so unpredictable. However, there are also many regularities, as will become apparent later.
More
Another take, by a physicist, on consciousness as an emergent property of the integrated processing of information.
YouTube Video, Consciousness is a mathematical pattern, June 2014, 16:36 minutes
Corey Anton illustrates how language contains within it, its own reflexivity. We can talk about how we talk about something as well as the thing itself.
YouTube Video, Talk-Reflexive Consciousness, Corey Anton, April 2010, 9:58 minutes