Week 12: What the semester doesn't resolve

The closing lecture — surveying the semester's twelve inductions and declining to hand over a tidy theory of consciousness at the end

10 May 2027

No lecture in this course, including this one, has closed the explanatory gap from week 1 — and none was going to. What twelve weeks of induction, noticing and description can do instead is narrow exactly where the gap sits: not in the physical story (which gets more complete every week), but in the step from that story to the felt fact of having the experience at all. This lecture is a retrospective, not a resolution.

Outline#

• a fast tour back through all four units: sensation, the idling mind, memory and others, scale and release
• what changed, if anything, in how precisely you could describe an experience versus how well you could actually predict or summon it
• the semester’s own act of letting go: leaving the hard problem open, rather than closing the course on an answer it was never going to earn