I have really enjoyed some of the presentations I’ve watched by anesthesiologists on how they know when a patient is conscious or not based on vital signs and brain activity. Seems like we understand when humans are experiencing things, and when they are not, by peering into the brain. As if consciousness is the result of synchronization across various brain regions. There are numerous traumas and diseases that disrupt the synchronization and cause patients to lose consciousness. It’s just so fascinating to me.

I’m hopeful that one day AI research will push our understanding of this topic way deeper than it is today. Not only are we designing neural networks that mimic the architecture we see in biological brains, but AI may be so advanced one day as to brute force some of these hard problems and essentially do the work for us in finding deeper discoveries. Look at what AI has already accomplished in the hard task of protein folding.

“What a time to be alive!!”