The content of our #consciousness depends crucially upon inhibitory processes through which selection and elimination can occur. More and more research (some of my own included) shows that physiological age-related #memory decline is not so much an issue of increasing but in fact decreasing forgetting (i.e. inhibitory "elimination"). Without directed inhibition, discrete memories have difficulty arriving to "consciousness" due to excess noise from overlap with other memories. ⬇️
Radical qualitative shifts like this ⬆️ in our understanding of fundamental cognitive processes (i.e. poor memory can arise from a deficit rather than an excess of forgetting) are truly fertile ground for future research into the nature, if not of "consciousness" itself, then at least into the processes that determine what enters #consciousness, studying differences between pre-conscious and conscious deliberation, and understanding why only part of deliberation is conscious, etc. ⬇️ @cognition
I'm fairly confident that I won't be writing on panpsychism again any time soon... My interests switched to reevaluating physicalism again, especially in connection with cognitive science and empirically-informed approaches to consciousness in a broader sense. I don't have a strong opinion on which position is 'true' - and maybe that's bad for a philosopher - I just go by what I find worthy of further investigation 🤷🏻♂️