In the last decade of his life, always willing to change his views in light of new evidence and ways of thinking, Francis warmed to information theory as the appropriate language for a theory of consciousness. Why? Well, in the absence of some special substance, such as Descartes’ thinking stuff that magically endows an organism with subjectivity, consciousness must arise out of causal interactions among hyperconnected brain cells. In this context, causal means that activity in neuron A, directly or indirectly, affects the likelihood of activity in neuron B in the immediate or more distant
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