Animal Sex Is Dangerous and Horrifying. So Why Does Sex Exist at All?
You’ve probably heard about duck penises—that they’re shaped like corkscrews, and that females have vaginas that corkscrew in the opposite direction. That one’s easy. But animal sex gets a whole lot weirder, with sexual dismemberment, servitude, and freaky parasitism that makes the duck’s corkscrew seem practically…um…straight? The current issue of our magazine is all about \[…\]
It’s a good time to be a pessimist. ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who...
From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0
Author Summary Integrated information theory (IIT) approaches the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate by first identifying the fundamental properties of experience itself: existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. IIT then postulates that the physical substrate of consciousness must satisfy these very properties. We develop a detailed mathematical framework in which composition, information, integration, and exclusion are defined precisely and made operational. This allows us to establish to what extent simple systems of mechanisms, such as logic gates or neuron-like elements, can form complexes that can account for the fundamental properties of consciousness. Based on this principled approach, we show that IIT can explain many known facts about consciousness and the brain, leads to specific predictions, and allows us to infer, at least in principle, both the quantity and quality of consciousness for systems whose causal structure is known. For example, we show that some simple systems can be minimally conscious, some complicated systems can be unconscious, and two different systems can be functionally equivalent, yet one is conscious and the other one is not.
Brain cells that track our location also can track time and distance, a study finds. This could explain how the brain uses place and time to organize memories throughout our lives.
