Shiva's Right Foot

I've looked through Lesswrong’s archives for mentions of the thalamus and its role in consciousness and I'm a little surprised that it is something which hasn't been discussed here before. In recent years it has become very clear that the thalamus is vitally important in consciousness and very arguably is the seat of consciousness. The pulsing electrochemical waves of the thalamus produce the drumbeat of temporally bound frames of sensory qualia which compose our subjective experience and the thalamus has a microarchitecture which indicates its role in combining information (mentally represented by those frames of sensory qualia) into a single mental consensus on things like perception or decsions [1]. The main discussant of the thalamus on Lesswrong is Steven Byrnes and the concepts I'm laying out here generally align very well with Byrnes’s writing with perhaps the minor addition of asserting the thalamus as the chief originator of the groups of options that are then run through cortical circuits. I agree with the central importance Byrnes places on the flow of thought through cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loops, though I place special emphasis on the thalamus. Integrated Information Theory proponent Giulio Tononi’s mentor, Gerard Edelman, also recognized the central importance of the thalamus. In a short clip on YouTube we can hear Edelman discuss the role of thalamus and thalamo-cortical relay in consciousness. In the clip Edelman discusses thalmo-cortical loops which are what give rise to the excitation patterns we detect as brain waves, to a large extent (alpha, beta, gamma, and delta). These wave events are theorized to cause what has been labeled “synchrony” or “temporal binding.” Here in his review of Gyorgy Buzsaki’s book on brain waves Scott Alexander describes one popular hypothesis on synchrony: > Brain waves provide “synchrony”, allowing a smallest granular unit of time and essentially converting life into a turn-based game. Suppose that