Related papers: Axiomatizing consciousness, with applications
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…
Studying psychiatric illness has often been limited by difficulties in connecting symptoms and behavior to neurobiology. Computational psychiatry approaches promise to bridge this gap by providing formal accounts of the latent information…
The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…
This paper proposes a unified framework in which consciousness emerges as a cycle-consistent, affectively anchored inference process, recursively structured by the interaction of emotion and cognition. Drawing from information theory,…
Any problem is concerned with the mind, but what do minds make a decision on? Here we show that there are three conditions for the mind to make a certain answer. We found that some difficulties in physics and mathematics are in fact…
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,…
Eudaemonics is the study of the nature, causes, and conditions of human well-being. According to the ethical theory of eudaemonia, reaping satisfaction and fulfillment from life is not only a desirable end, but a moral responsibility.…
There is cognitive, neurological, and computational support for the hypothesis that defocusing attention results in divergent or associative thought, conducive to insight and finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in…
Autonomous systems with cognitive features are on their way into the market. Within complex environments, they promise to implement complex and goal oriented behavior even in a safety related context. This behavior is based on a certain…
This paper proposes an approach to framing and answering fundamental questions about consciousness. It argues that many of the more theoretical debates about consciousness, such as debates about "when does it begin?", are misplaced and…
When human cognition is modeled in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, there is a pervasive idea that humans employ mental representations in order to navigate the world and make predictions about outcomes of future actions. By understanding…
Computational modeling plays an increasingly important role in neuroscience, highlighting the philosophical question of how computational models explain. In the context of neural network models for neuroscience, concerns have been raised…
Manipulation of the effects of consciousness by external influence on the human brain is considered in the context of the nonlinear dynamical modeling of interaction between automatic and conscious processes.
To make nature mathematically tractable, the scientific model of the world omits qualia--colors, sounds, tastes, sensations--leaving only what admits of numerical characterization. The "hard problem" of consciousness--the enigma of why and…
Representations play a central role in the study of both biological and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy of mind. Across neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy, a recurring theme is that representations not only carry…
Inspired by empirical work in neuroscience for Bayesian approaches to brain function, we give a unified probabilistic account of various types of symbolic reasoning from data. We characterise them in terms of formal logic using the…
The study and understanding of human behaviour is relevant to computer science, artificial intelligence, neural computation, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and several other areas. Presupposing cognition as basis of behaviour,…
We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws.…
The article "Physics of Consciousness" treats mind as an abstract Hilbert space with a set of orthogonal base vectors to describe information like particles, which are considered to be the elementary excitation of a quantum field. A…
Cognition does not only depend on bottom-up sensor feature abstraction, but also relies on contextual information being passed top-down. Context is higher level information that helps to predict belief states at lower levels. The main…