Related papers: On the evolution of phenomenal consciousness

Leibniz thought experiment of perception, sensing, and thinking is reconsidered. We try to understand Leibniz picture in view of our knowledge of basic neuroscience. In particular we can see how the emergence of consciousness could in…

The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…

Imagine a naive organism who does not know anything about the world. It can capture signals through its sensors and it can make actions. What kind of knowledge about the world is accessible to the organism? This situation is analog to that…

Any scientific attempt to explain consciousness is tasked with reconciling the third person objective perspective of science with our first person subjective experience of the world. A good point of departure is to consider situations in…

In this theoretical work the temporal aspect of consciousness is analyzed. We start from the notion that while conscious experience seems to change constantly, yet for any of its contents to be consciously perceived they must last for some…

Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…

A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…

Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations -- mime, language, art -- to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access…

We examine the question of whether it is possible for a diagonalizing system, to learn to use environmental reward and punishment as an information, in order to appropriately adapt. More specifically, we study the possiblity of such a…

How is language related to consciousness? Language functions to categorise perceptual experiences (e.g., labelling interoceptive states as 'happy') and higher-level constructs (e.g., using 'I' to represent the narrative self). Psychedelic…

We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…

We consider the implications of the mathematical analysis of neurone-to-neurone dynamical complex networks. We show how the dynamical behaviour of small scale strongly connected networks lead naturally to non-binary information processing…

Referring expression comprehension aims to localize objects identified by natural language descriptions. This is a challenging task as it requires understanding of both visual and language domains. One nature is that each object can be…

The encounter of artificial intelligence with consciousness research is often framed as a challenge: could this science determine whether such systems are conscious? We suggest it is equally an opportunity to expand and test the scope of…

Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…

People's associations between colors and concepts influence their ability to interpret the meanings of colors in information visualizations. Previous work has suggested such effects are limited to concepts that have strong, specific…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

People have the ability to make sensible assumptions about other people's emotional states by being sympathetic, and because of our common sense of knowledge and the ability to think visually. Over the years, much research has been done on…

It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…

Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…