Sean Carroll

Do you think boredom or tiredness are merely useful behavioral markers of consciousness, or do they point to something deeper, that consciousness requires an ongoing self-relation across time with needs or desires that can fail to be satisfied?

Well, on the one hand, I'm going to repeat my usual disclaimer.

I am not an expert on consciousness, and I don't have any deep theories about consciousness.

I have vague feelings, and I have strong convictions that consciousness does not require us to change the laws of physics.

That's my only firm belief about consciousness.

But everything you say, I'm not at all familiar with Leopardi's work, but it sounds good to me.

I mean, all these words sound more or less like what I'm familiar with from thinking about entropy and cognition and things like that, you know.

The reason why we feel like time is passing, this is another question we're going to get to later in the AMA, but we feel like time is passing because entropy is increasing.

Because we are constantly changing, right?

We're not static things.

We're not computer programs that you can turn off and then just fire up again.

We have processes going on beneath the surface.

You remember the conversation we had with Antonio Damasio many years ago here on Mindscape.

He talks about feelings and their homeostatic regulation.

That's a way of saying that the body and the mind, which is generated by the body, have a way they want to be, have states that they want to be in, and we gradually drift away from those states and the body and the mind try to pull us back to those states, much like a thermostat does homeostatic regulation.

And I think very roughly that this sort of drifting gives rise to these feelings of boredom or tiredness or whatever, and that consciousness very naturally arises through evolution as part of the mechanism by which we work this.

Knowing what state we're in helps us feel like we should work to fix it, to get back to our happy place, our equilibrium, or whatever you want to call it.

So I do think that there's probably, or at least plausibly, I should say, I shouldn't even say probably, what do I know, but plausibly a connection between all those things.

You know, I don't know, you know, poet philosophers are great people, but, you know, they're not greatly known for suggesting falsifiable theories.

So I don't know what the modern version of this is, but it might be roughly on the right track.