Related papers: On the Minimal Theory of Consciousness Implicit in…
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…
As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences - as well as their predictive and explanatory power - becomes ever more pressing. Recently, a number of structured…
Phenomenology is the rigorous descriptive study of conscious experience. Recent attempts to formalize Husserlian phenomenology provide us with a mathematical model of perception as a function of prior knowledge and expectation. In this…
Active inference is a normative principle underwriting perception, action, planning, decision-making and learning in biological or artificial agents. From its inception, its associated process theory has grown to incorporate complex…
Human consciousness has been a long-lasting mystery for centuries, while machine intelligence and consciousness is an arduous pursuit. Researchers have developed diverse theories for interpreting the consciousness phenomenon in human brains…
Active inference is a formal approach to study cognition based on the notion that adaptive agents can be seen as engaging in a process of approximate Bayesian inference, via the minimisation of variational and expected free energies.…
Active inference is emerging as a possible unifying theory of perception and action in cognitive and computational neuroscience. On this theory, perception is a process of inferring the causes of sensory data by minimising the error between…
The science of consciousness has been successful over the last decades. Yet, it seems that some of the key questions remain unanswered. Perhaps, as a science of consciousness, we cannot move forward using the same theoretical commitments…
The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in…
The theoretical base for consciousness, in particular an explanation of how consciousness is defined by the brain, has long been sought by science. We propose a partial theory of consciousness as relations defined by typical data. The…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
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 pursuit of artificial consciousness requires conceptual clarity to navigate its theoretical and empirical challenges. This paper introduces a composite, multilevel, and multidimensional model of consciousness as a heuristic framework to…
Active inference is a mathematical framework which originated in computational neuroscience as a theory of how the brain implements action, perception and learning. Recently, it has been shown to be a promising approach to the problems of…
A beginning is made at mapping four neural theories of consciousness onto the Common Model of Cognition. This highlights how the four jointly depend on recurrent local modules plus a cognitive cycle operating on a global working memory with…
The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…
Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena,…
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing…
Given the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, understanding the foundations of intelligent behaviour is increasingly important. Active inference, regarded as a general theory of behaviour, offers a principled approach to probing…
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,…