Related papers: Consciousness, brains and the replica problem

Understanding of the phenomena of vision and thought require clarification of the general mechanism of perception. So far, philosophical inquiries and scientific investigations have not been able to address clearly the mysteries surrounding…

Neural theories of consciousness face three difficulties: (1) The selection problem: how are those neurons which cause consciousness selected, from all the other neurons which do not? (2) the precision problem: how do neurons hold a…

We examine the role of a conscious observer in a typical quantum mechanical measurement. Four rules are given that govern stochastic choice and state reduction in several cases of continuous and intermittent observation. It is found that…

Even though the brain operates in pure darkness, within the skull, it can infer the most likely causes of its sensory input. An approach to modelling this inference is to assume that the brain has a generative model of the world, which it…

Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…

This paper argues that self-awareness is a learned behavior that emerges in organisms whose brains have a sufficiently integrated, complex ability for associative learning and memory. Continual sensory input of information related to the…

Adaptive behavior is mainly the result of adaptive brains. We go a step beyond and claim that the brain does not only adapt to its surrounding reality but rather, it builds itself up to constructs its own reality. That is, rather than just…

A phenomenological approach using the states of spin-like observables is developed to understand the nature of consciousness and the totality of experience. The three states of consciousness are taken to form the triplet of eigenstates of a…

The human brain is autonomously active. To understand the functional role of this self-sustained neural activity, and its interplay with the sensory data input stream, is an important question in cognitive system research and we review here…

Conscious experience permeates our daily lives, yet general consensus on a theory of consciousness remains elusive. In the face of such difficulty, an alternative strategy is to address a more general (meta-level) version of the problem for…

Consciousness is a sequential process of awareness which can focus on one piece of information at a time. This process of awareness experiences causation which underpins the notion of time while it interplays with matter and energy, forming…

Tractatus de Conscientia is a tractatus-style sketch toward a modern, physically operational account of consciousness. It is also a tractatus-style attempt to talk about consciousness in a way that stays close to what we can actually test…

An approach to nonlinear dynamical modeling of interaction between conscious and automatic processes in the brain is proposed. Illustration of this approach on the nonlinear equation for the current density in the cortex is presented.…

The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…

We study the transition in the functional networks that characterize the human brains' conscious-state to an unconscious subliminal state of perception by using k-core percolation. We find that the most inner core (i.e., the most connected…

Various research initiatives try to utilize the operational principles of organisms and brains to develop alternative, biologically inspired computing paradigms and artificial cognitive systems. This paper reviews key features of the…

It has been suggested that consciousness plays an important role in quantum mechanics as it is necessary for the collapse of wave function during the measurement. Furthermore, this idea has spawned a symmetrical proposal: a possibility that…

We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of…

A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range…

A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…