Related papers: Consciousness beyond neural fields: expanding the …
The limitations of current technology do not allow one to foresee the expansion of the humankind beyond our planet for at least a few decades. Furthermore, the laws of physics, as for as they are known, preclude any form of traveling beyond…
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…
To truly eliminate Cartesian ghosts from the science of consciousness, we must describe consciousness as an aspect of the physical. Integrated Information Theory states that consciousness arises from intrinsic information generated by…
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…
The mechanisms underlying major aspects of the human brain remain a mystery. It is unknown how verbal episodic memory is formed and integrated with sensory episodic memory. There is no consensus on the function and nature of dreaming. Here…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's…
Machine learning algorithms have achieved superhuman performance in specific complex domains. However, learning online from few examples and compositional learning for efficient generalization across domains remain elusive. In humans, such…
Sensible Quantum Mechanics or Mindless Sensationalism is a framework for relating consciousness to a quantum universe. It states that each conscious perception has a measure that is given by the expectation value of a corresponding quantum…
Consciousness has been hypothesized to operate as a global workspace, which accesses and integrates multimodal information in a unified manner, supports expectation violation monitoring and reduction, and the motivation, programming and…
An interdisciplinary physical theory of emergent consciousness has previously been proposed, stemming from quantum computation-like behavior between 10^9 or more entangled molecular qubit states (microtubulin). This model relies on the…
The quest for a scientific description of consciousness has given rise to new theoretical and empirical paradigms for the investigation of phenomenological contents as well as clinical disorders of consciousness. An outstanding challenge in…
The ``Hard Problem" of consciousness refers to a long-standing enigma about how qualia emerge from physical processes in the brain. Building on insights from the development of non-Euclidean geometry, this paper seeks to present a…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
We propose the quantum mechanical description of complex systems should be performed using two types of causality relation: the ordering relation ($x\prec y$) and the subset relation ($A\subseteq B$). The structures with two ordering…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes or universe domains -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our…
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…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
A model of consciousness is proposed which, having a logical basis, lends itself to simulation using a simple mathematical model called Consciousness as Entropy Reduction (CER). The approach has been inspired by previous models such as GWT,…
We are used to the fact that most if not all physical theories are based on the set of real numbers (or another associative division algebra). These all have a cardinality larger than that of the natural numbers, i.e. form a continuum. It…