Related papers: Consciousness: Here, There but Not Everywhere
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
Consciousness is presented not as a unified and uniquely human characteristic, but rather as an emergent property of several building blocks, most of which are demonstrably present in other species. Each block has its own rationale under…
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…
Information theory is a practical and theoretical framework developed for the study of communication over noisy channels. Its probabilistic basis and capacity to relate statistical structure to function make it ideally suited for studying…
The problem of consciousness faced several challenges for a few reasons: (a) a lack of necessary and sufficient conditions, without which we would not know how close we are to the solution, (b) a lack of a synthesis framework to build…
This essay discusses the idea that a Theory of Everything would not be complete without a theory of consciousness as one of its parts, and the suggestion that new physics may be needed to describe consciousness. I argue that the motivations…
The concept of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), which suggests that specific neural activities are linked to conscious experiences, has gained widespread acceptance. This acceptance is based on a wealth of evidence from…
This paper proposes a conceptual framework in which intelligence and consciousness emerge from relational structure rather than from prediction or domain-specific mechanisms. Intelligence is defined as the capacity to form and integrate…
Digital life, a form of life generated by computer programs or artificial intelligence systems, it possesses self-awareness, thinking abilities, emotions, and subjective consciousness. Achieving it involves complex neural networks,…
We show that the modern quantum mechanics, and particularly the theory of decoherence, allows for formulating a sort of a physical metatheory of consciousness. Particularly, the analysis of the necessary conditions for the occurrence of…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states,…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Cognitive processes are realized across an extraordinary range of natural, artificial, and hybrid systems, yet there is no unified framework for comparing their forms, limits, and unrealized possibilities. Here, we propose a cognition space…
The human brain is the substrate for human intelligence. By simulating the human brain, artificial intelligence builds computational models that have learning capabilities and perform intelligent tasks approaching the human level. Deep…
The discourse on risks from advanced AI systems ("AIs") typically focuses on misuse, accidents and loss of control, but the question of AIs' moral status could have negative impacts which are of comparable significance and could be realised…
Whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can possess consciousness is a contentious question because of the inherent challenges of defining and operationalizing subjective experience. This paper proposes a framework to reframe the…
A hypothesis is presented that non-separability of degrees of freedom is the fundamental property underlying consciousness in physical systems. The amount of consciousness in a system is determined by the extent of non-separability and the…
Given the constant rise in quantity and quality of data obtained from neural systems on many scales ranging from molecular to systems', information-theoretic analyses became increasingly necessary during the past few decades in the…