Related papers: A thought experiment on consciousness
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…
It is generally accepted that machines can replicate cognitive tasks performed by conscious agents as long as they are not based on the capacity of awareness. We consider several views on the nature of subjective awareness, which is…
Understanding of the phenomena of vision and thought require clarification of the general mechanism of perception. So far, philosophical inquiries and scientific investigations have not been able to address clearly the mysteries surrounding…
At the core of bodily self-consciousness is the perception of the ownership of one's body. Recent efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind the brain's encoding of the self-body have led to various attempts to develop…
The physics of matter in the condensed state is concerned with problems in which the number of constituent particles is vastly greater than can be easily comprehended. The inherent physical limitations of the human mind are fundamental and…
The question of the nature of space around us has occupied thinkers since the dawn of humanity, with scientists and philosophers today implicitly assuming that space is something that exists objectively. Here we show that this does not have…
An approach to implementing variational Bayesian inference in biological systems is considered, under which the thermodynamic free energy of a system directly encodes its variational free energy. In the case of the brain, this assumption…
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…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
Human brains are arguably the most complex entities known. Composed of billions of neurons, connected via a highly detailed structure where the underlying method by which functionality occurs is still debated. Here we consider one theory…
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…
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…
Inspired by the Penrose-Hameroff thesis, we are intuitively led to examine an intriguing correspondence of 'induction' (by fields), with the complex phenomenon of (metabolism-sustained) consciousness: Did sequences of associated induction…
There have lately been a variety of attempts to connect, or even explain, if not in fact, reduce human consciousness to quantum mechanical processes. Such attempts tend to draw a sharp and fundamental distinction between the role of…
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…
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…
Theory of Mind is an essential ability of humans to infer the mental states of others. Here we provide a coherent summary of the potential, current progress, and problems of deep learning approaches to Theory of Mind. We highlight that many…
Due to the self-referencing aspect, consciousness is placed in a unique non-computable position among natural phenomena. Non-computable consciousness was previously analyzed on the basis of self-referential cyclical time. This paper extends…
The "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics, and the "hard problem" of cognitive science are the most profound open problems of the two research fields, and certainly among the deepest of all unsettled conundrums in contemporary science…
Proponents of Complexity Science believe that the huge variety of emergent phenomena observed throughout nature, are generated by relatively few microscopic mechanisms. Skeptics however point to the lack of concrete examples in which a…