Related papers: On the Evolution of Subjective Experience
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
The ancient mind/body problem continues to be one of deepest mysteries of science and of the human spirit. Despite major advances in many fields, there is still no plausible link between subjective experience (qualia) and its realization in…
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…
As language-based AI systems become more anthropomorphic, the question of whether they can have subjective experience is increasingly pressing. I focus here on the tractability of research questions in the space of AI consciousness. I argue…
After centuries of research, how subjective experience relates to physical phenomena remains unclear. Recent strategies attempt to identify the physical correlates of experience. Less studied is how scientists eliminate the "spurious"…
The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to…
How subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) arises out of objective material processes has been called the hard problem. The neuroscience of consciousness has set out to find the sufficient conditions for consciousness and theoretical…
The way we view the reality of nature, including ourselves, depend on consciousness.It also defines the identity of the person, since we know people in terms of their experiences. In general, consciousness defines human existence in this…
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial…
This is a model of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness, what it feels like, is answered. The work builds on medical research analyzing the source and mechanisms associated with our feelings. It goes further by describing a…
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…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
The consciousness standing for artificial intelligence divides opinions across epistemological positions. Whether or not machines can be conscious, and whether we can ascertain the truth of such a proposition for any given case, has…
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…
Artificial self-perception is the machine ability to perceive its own body, i.e., the mastery of modal and intermodal contingencies of performing an action with a specific sensors/actuators body configuration. In other words, the…
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…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
The human self has many facets: there is the physical body and then there are different concepts or representations supported by processes in the brain such as the ecological, social, temporal, conceptual, and experiential self. The…
This work aims to present our current best physical understanding of common-envelope evolution (CEE). We highlight areas of consensus and disagreement, and stress ideas which should point the way forward for progress in this important but…