Agree, with anonymous, just can´t wait to read the whole book and deepen my understanding. With the right editing it will certainly be a new and even more important, insightful and rich book in the tradition of GEB! And I can´t wait to give it to all my friends and professors, and I can´t wait to hear the reception from academia, they/we have so much to learn. You will be on TED and on EDGE in no time! Your hard work, and deep thought is so precious, I think it is rather wonderful that a social ape can penetrate so deep into reality. I just think this blogform is a bit strange choice for such high quality material, a wiki would be much more appropriate and easy to use. A table of contents would be of great use in this stage when you try to recommend this stuff to other people!

About the post: I guess you are not completely ruling out the role of physics in the final understanding of consciousness, because even though QM may not play an important role, a deeper understanding of spacetime, may... But hopefully it all lies in mathematics as Hofstadter and Goerzel suggests, that would be the most elegant and also practical reality, sadly reality does not obey hopes...

I also hope that there is not a general bias amongst scientists familiar with physics towards having consciousness interfere with physics, because they are so used to have them in different domains, and because so much confusion has arisen when you have not made this distinction clear. And because so many sloppy theories are riding on this hypothesis that is so much more intuitive. It could still be the case that fundamental physics can explain some aspect of say the hard problem. There seems to be two competing aesthetics in the matter of consciousness and physics, and I am still not convinced it is more than aesthetics, therefor I wait in taking a stance myself.

But I am so grateful Eli convinced me of the impossibility of Zombies, I used to be consider epifenomenalism. But now I know better. But that leads me to the inevitable question of the functional role of qualia. Why chocolate tastes good, which seems to have a causal effect on me wanting to eat it, rather than me just having chocolate eating behavior whiteout the intermediate of qualia. Does a dog have qualia behaviour or just eating beahviour when it finds something good? Qualia and consciousness seems to be an internal monitoring mechanism with very precise input from evolutionary adaptive qualia(like emotions, strong tastes, sensations of the body parts of the opposite sex), but for what purpose, and why the qualia, and what are the effects on neurocomputation? Or if it IS the neurocomputation, then why am I experiencing such a nice whole and not a lot of different processes in my brain, why does it seem that I am only experiencing some output of the work of my brain? Why do I need to expereience anything anyway? What does the resource limitations in my consciousness depend on. Why can´t I experiences all my memories at the same time. Is counsciousness a separate brainsystem(like the thalamocortical loop, bioelectromagnetic field or even quantum mind) or just a product of the whole brain working together. If it is a separable brain system, what are the measurable causal effects. If it is not, what distinguishes conscious from non conscious processing. If consciousness is a mathematical phenomenon, then still, why is qualia so rich and strongly qualitative, compare the feeling of hunger to the color red or to the sound of a piano? Maybe it is just the way information feels in the universe. Which leads to the question if all information feels itself, does a book feel the structure of the words in it, if not then what makes information feel itself, a strange loop? Well what about a TV set and a camera pointing towards each other. But what is it with a universe that allows such strange phenomena. Well anything is strange to us really, and nothing is really strange to the universe. We will probably always find everything rather absurd but wonderful if we think really deep about it, even if we are no longer as confused in our understanding as we are now. But the universe remains neutral on strangeness. "Since the beginning not one unusual thing has happened"

Appreciating and understanding the obvious is what makes a wise man wise. Nothing is really obvious. But the pursuit of truth should be! Nobody can dispute reductionism if he understands that the map is not the territory.

I value many things intrinsically! This may make me happy or not, but I don´t rely on the feelings of possible happiness when I make decisions. I see intrinsic value in happiness itself, but also as a means for other values, such as art, science, beauty, complexity, truth etc, wich I often value even more than hapiness. But sentient life may be the highest value. Why would we accept happiness as our highest terminal value when it is just a way to make living organisms do certain things. Ofcourse it feels good and is important, but it is still rather arbitary. I think theese things as rather important if we don´t want to end up wireheaded. Complexity/Beauty may be my second highest value after sentience, hapiness may only come as a third thing, then maybe truth and logic... Well, I will write more about this later...

Great post again!! This seems to be a good portal to the series as well! But my gosh I feel infoleptic!! I feel as though I would need 100 more brains to be able to do and read and learn everything I would like to with 1 brain! And if I would have a 100 brains I would probably feel I would need a 1000! etc. I think it is really sad this blog didn´t have some kind of rating system! There seems to be so many good posts. And if someone totally new to this would come here it would be hard to know where to start. So a list of the most important posts would be really great! Although 80% of your stuff seems to always hold the your standards! It would also be good if there would be a way to browse only your posts. Not that the other posts aren´t good, it is just that your posts have certain themes which one would like to hold on to and go deep with!

I am a great believer in utilizing/abusing our social brain for pursuing our higher values! Have you ever thought about having some kind of minimal microblog / status indicator of your real work on AI. Of course this would take some minutes of your precious time. This could make your work feel more connected to the world of other beings, which this is ultimately aimed for. If you would not have done any progress in a week you would directly feel embarrassed in front of humanity(which I am sure you already do, and I do too). If you would make great progress you would feel proud, and people could see it and give you emotional credit! I know you may not need this kind of system, you seem to have a very robust and disciplined mental operating system. It may also be that it would be only distracting to your real intrinsic altruism, or even distort your work. But it may also be that it would act as a healthy pusher, and make it more explicit that this is not your private project but the greatest project of humanity, which you happen to be one of the few that have competence to actually work on. It could also act as a please for people to come up with stimulating ideas(i.e. bad ideas that stimulate better ideas). But you already have a lot of distraction, so the balance have to be hard to keep. Good luck! Keep on pushing!