Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation (2023) by George Musser is subtitled "Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe". It's a bit first-person, a bit physics-arrogant, a bit anecdotal — and also appropriately skeptical about recent technical work on "the Hard Problem" of understanding how matter and mind can coexist. Along the way, there are marvelous asides, like this glimpse of how Karl Friston (professor at University College London) thinks about things:

... Friston's daily routine harnesses a psychiatrist's awareness of how brains work. Before bed, he reviews his notes on whatever problem he is working on, so that his subconscious can turn it over in his sleep. In the morning, he sits for two or three hours with his pipe, no paper, no phone, just thinking. Confining the problem to his working memory allows him to focus solely on its essence. Only when he has a solution does he pick up a pencil. "You really have to drill down deep to what you can solve," he said. ...

Musser discusses two leading theories of mind, "predictive coding" and "integrated information theory":

... Both theories are mathematically meaty, built on simple principles, and grand in scope—in a word, physics-y. Both view the brain as a special type of neural network and, like theories of neural networks in general, are based as much on physics as on biology. Both draw on physics concepts such as energy and causality. Both look beyond the particulars of human biology to seek the qualities of consciousness in other animals, in machines, in collectives, in inanimate matter—in anything, really. Both theories make debatable philosophical assumptions, but they align with most physicists' gut feeling that consciousness is a collective or emergent property.

Both, too, invert our usual conception of ourselves. It may seem to us that we have direct, unfiltered access to the wider world, but, in truth, each of us lives in a world of our own making. What we see and sense is a hallucination; it is actively generated by the brain. We recognize it as a hallucination only when it slips its leash—when the brain somehow fails to recalibrate our private world to match the evidence of our senses.

Both theories also have plenty of skeptics and could be utterly wrong. ...

Putting Ourselves Back also reviews quantum mechanical theories, cosmological speculations, and other physics-centric approaches to explaining consciousnessness. All likely incorrect; many likely to offer insight. Good!

_{(cf Man of Mystery (2004-08-12), Hard, Hard Problem (2021-03-21), Being You (2023-11-01), ...) - ^z - 2023-12-20}