Lexicon
The Conditions for an Inside
The features that seem to accompany experience in the beings we know: binding of moments into a present, a shared workspace, a split between what a system does and what happens to it, a boundary, mattering, self-awareness and kept memory.
The name for the list of features that, in people and other animals, come together with experience:
- binding: the just-past shapes the moment arriving now, so that there is a present at all;
- a shared workspace: one limited stage that many processes in the system read from and write to;
- the split: the system separates what it does from what happens to it, and its own processing uses that difference;
- a boundary: what sets a system apart from others, in an animal its body and in a model its weights;
- mattering: some states are better or worse for the system, in the sense that its own processing steers toward or away from them;
- self-awareness: knowing that you are the one things happen to;
- kept memory: a record of the past that lasts, and with it a long history.
The term began as a list of three conditions: a boundary, stakes, and binding. “Mattering” replaced “stakes”.
Which of these features experience needs, and which only travel with it, is not part of the definition. For what the blog claims about them, see the working positions Experience comes with a set of features: a map, not a line, My best candidate for a point of view: the split between doing and being done to and Which features does experience need?. For how the features relate to the coarser three axes of mind, see that entry.