Tangentially related,
one of the best things my family did visiting London last summer was to take a private bike tour of the east end street art scene with Alternative London https://alternativeldn.co.uk/
Coming from SF the ride was blissfully flat and easy and our guide (the founder) was exceptional in every respect.
It's one of the two things we tell people going to not miss... the other being, mudlarking for Victorian pipe stems [guaranteed find] and maybe something more magical [rare but happens, a local showed us an Elizabethean coin and mediaeval pin she'd found]. We went, across the river a bit west of the Tate Modern, IIRC.
I like it because it makes it clear that the boundaries of those stable structures are what encode the world model that encompasses the future. Conscious systems just decode the boundaries of these recursive structures.
Corollary: LLMs aren't smart, they're just recursive structures (differently recursive than our minds) that can decode the boundary we store in language the recursion of language...? [2][3]
---
My semi-related crackpot theory (informed by some pending unpublished research involving Yakir Aharonov and Michael Levin) is that fundamentally, the structures of consciousness are just the result of thermodynamic evolution finding a way to emulate quantum effects at the macro scale: assuming Aharonov's two-state vector formalism[3] holds some truth, the quantum present is formed by a particle arriving from the past and future. Cross your eyes, and consciousness sure looks a lot like time travel, or information arriving from the future.
Aka consciousness is just a roundabout way to create an emulation layer for quantum effects.
[1]: http://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2024/02/12/fractal.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191597
[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226852316
Why?
Not _how would this be the case_—I'm curious _why_ this would be the case, i.e. if this represents an outcome that was selected for/climbed to,
what advantage does that offer entities with consciousness?