Consciousness: that which makes meaning.
If we are to understand Friston's Free Energy Principle, all living organism makes meaning, down to the cellular level. It is by making meaning – sensing surprise, interpreting, and then acting, a Learning Cycles – that they adapt and survive.
Making meaning.
And it is by these same inference models that computers are being given consciousness, what we are calling artificial intelligence.
To see all living organisms as having consciousness is wondrous. For it sparks our couriosity into the patterns of meaning that they are creating to understand and adapt.
For we are the sole creatures, _homo sapiens_, that have a consciousness of consciousness, a meta consciousness knows as Autonoetic Consciousness, that gives us a window through which we can peer into the other.
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