Related papers: Why Is Anything Conscious?
Developments in machine learning and computing power suggest that artificial general intelligence is within reach. This raises the question of artificial consciousness: if a computer were to be functionally equivalent to a human, being able…
This is a proof of the strong AI hypothesis, i.e. that machines can be conscious. It is a phenomenological proof that pattern-recognition and subjective consciousness are the same activity in different terms. Therefore, it proves that…
As society transitions towards an AI-based decision-making infrastructure, an ever-increasing number of decisions once under control of humans are now delegated to automated systems. Even though such developments make various parts of…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
Knowledge is the most precious asset of humankind. People extract the experience from the data that provide for us the reality through the feelings. Generally speaking, it is possible to see the analogy of knowledge elaboration between…
Deep generative models, while revolutionizing fields like image and text generation, largely operate as opaque ``black boxes'', hindering human understanding, control, and alignment. While methods like sparse autoencoders (SAEs) show…
Consciousness will be introduced axiomatically, inspired by Buddhist insight meditation and psychology, logic in computer science, and cognitive neuroscience, as consisting of a stream of $configurations$ that is $compound$, $discrete$, and…
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…
We consider a living organism as an observer of the evolution of its environment recording sensory information about the state space X of the environment in real time. Sensory information is sampled and then processed on two levels. On the…
We look at consciousness through the lens of Theoretical Computer Science, a branch of mathematics that studies computation under resource limitations, distinguishing functions that are efficiently computable from those that are not. From…
This work aims to rigorously define the values of perception, prediction, communication, and common sense in decision making. The defined quantities are decision-theoretic, but have information-theoretic analogues, e.g., they share some…
Any theory amenable to scientific inquiry must have testable consequences. This minimal criterion is uniquely challenging for the study of consciousness, as we do not know if it is possible to confirm via observation from the outside…
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…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
Lexical Semantics is concerned with how words encode mental representations of the world, i.e., concepts . We call this type of concepts, classification concepts . In this paper, we focus on Visual Semantics , namely on how humans build…
This paper is a shortened version of the full paper that was published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology in May 2022. In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this…
As intelligent systems are developed across diverse substrates - from machine learning models and neuromorphic hardware to in vitro neural cultures - understanding what gives a system agency has become increasingly important. Existing…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
In this article, we employ mathematical concepts as a tool to examine the phenomenon of consciousness experience and logical phenomena. Through our investigation, we aim to demonstrate that our experiences, while not confined to…
Some conscious contents disappear after access; others return repeatedly, long after their triggering conditions have ceased. We propose Canxianization as the process by which a perturbation becomes closure-resistant self-relevant…