Reddit mentions of Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind

> Or can someone shed some light on what they're discussing and what this paper is proposing?

1. Consciousness (atleast, consciousness(es) that we are familiar with) seems to occur at a certain scale. Conscious states doesn't seem to significantly covary with noisy schocastic activities of individual cells and such; rather it seems to covary at with macro-level patterns and activities emereging from a population of neurons and stuffs. We are not aware of how we precisely process information (like segmenting images, detecting faces, recognizing speeches), or perform actions (like precise motor controls and everything). We are aware of things at a much higher scale. However, consciousness doesn't seem to exist at an overly macro-level scale either (like, for example, we won't think that USA is conscious).
   
   
   
2. The authors seem to think that the reason consciousness exists in this scale because of the property of 'non-trivial information closure'. A system is informationally closed if the information flow from environment to the system is 0. A trivial case of information closure is when the system and the environment is pretty much independent. For the authors, the degree of consciousness is instead associated with the degree of closure in non-trivially closed informational systems. What is 'non-trivial information closure'? - in this case, even though the environment at time t (E_t) plays a role in the formation of the system state in time t (Y_t), Yt encodes enough information about itself , the environment, and the 'environment's influence on itself', that it is possible for the system to predict much of (not necessarily everything) Y{t+1} just on the basis of Y_t alone, without accessing E_t.
   
   
   2.5) Rejection of 'trivial information closure' helps a bit with bounding conditions. We can think of an aggregate of informationally closed system as a informationally closed system, but we wouldn't think that a mere aggregate of potentially 'conscious' minds are together having a single unitive consciousness. Since trivial information closure doesn't contribute consciousness according to their hypothesis, adding independent closed systems to another system would not change the degree of consciousness of either. This may also have some relationship with the idea of integration in IIT (Information Integration Theory).
   
   
   
3. (2) can explain why consciousness seem to be associated with a certain scale. It is difficult to make prediction by modeling all noisy schocastic neural-celllular-whatever activities. Prediction are easier if essential informations (including ideas of causation, and such) of the environment are modeled at higher 'coarse-grained' scale (see (1)) (more at the level of population than at the level of samples).
   
   
   
4. You may now wonder, even if predictability from self-representated states can exist in a certain scale which happens to be seemingly associated with consciousness, it's not clear why predictibility is necessary for consciousness, nor it's very intuitive that our degree of consciousness depends on predictibility. For that I don't have any clear answers. Intuitively, most of our conscious experiences does seem to be laden with immediate expectations, and anticipations - even if we don't always explicitly notice it. The so-called 'specious present' may always represent immediate past as retention and immediate potential future as anticipation. But besides that, this framework can have other intuitive properties, like for example, following this framework, high-level contentful consciousness must have a much richer representations (of self and environmental information) with a more complex model that has higher predictive prowess - which would need a more complex neural substrate - which seems to affirm the intuition that 'higher consciousness' would correlate with more 'complex stuffs'. It can also explain differences in conscious and unconscious processing. For example, it can explain blindsight (where people report that they are blind - not conscious of visual information; but behave in a manner that shows evidence that they have some access to visual information) by saying that in this case, the environmental visuation information is more directly associated with actions and such; it is not internally representated in a rich state at a coarse grained level offering predictibility - thus people with blindsight are not conscious of their 'sight'.
   
   
   
5. 'predictions' seems to be the central part of the paper, however it still seems to be lacking in intuition about why. However, there is a decent chunk of literature in cognitive science and stuff related to the relationship with predictive processing and cognition. PP, Prediction Error Minimization and such are recent hot topics in cognitive science and philosophy. These line of works may or may not better support the paper. This paper is aware of the works and discusses it close relationship with them. ICT seems to extend upon PP in distinguishing unconscious predictions, and conscious predictions, and incorporate the idea of scale and the relationship of consciousness and coarse-graining. I don't have much of a background about PP, but works of Andy Clark may be good introductory materials: (For example) https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action-Embodied/dp/0190933216/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=andy+clark&qid=1570248756&s=books&sr=1-1
   
   I cannot personally vouch for the book, but Andy Clark is one of 'big guys' in the field; so he can be a pretty reliable source.
   
   
   
   
6. ICT seems to work well with some of the other theories of consciousness too (Global Workspace Theory, IIT, PP), which the authors discuss about in the paper. It seems to fill in some gaps of those theories. But I am not very qualified to judge about that.
   
   
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   About background materials. It seemed pretty readable to me without much of a background. For statements about neural activties, I am just taking their words for it, but the citations can be places to look. You can find more about phenomena like 'blindsight' from googling, if you weren't already aware of it. As opposed to the recommendations made by the other redditor, I don't think it has much to do with anything related to the hard problem of consciousness (Nagel's Bat or Chalmer's zombie) at all and you don't need to read them for this paper - though they can interesting reads for their own sake and can help better understanding the potential limitations - but these work goes on a more philosophical direction not quite related to the scope of the paper. The equations may have some relation with information theory (again the citations may be the best bet for better background). PP seems to be most closely related to the paper with the idea of predictability being on the center. So that may something to explore for background. IIT can be another background material for this: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588
   
   https://www.iep.utm.edu/int-info/