Related papers: A thought experiment on consciousness
The encounter of artificial intelligence with consciousness research is often framed as a challenge: could this science determine whether such systems are conscious? We suggest it is equally an opportunity to expand and test the scope of…
We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
Most of us think we know some basic facts about how time works. The facts we believe we know are based on a few intuitions about time, which are, in turn, based on our conscious waking experiences. As far as I can tell, these intuitions…
When viewed at a certain coarse grain, the brain seems a relatively small dynamical system composed by a few dozen interacting areas, performing a number of stereotypical behaviors. It is known that, even relatively small dynamical systems…
For the most of my life, I have earned my living as a computer vision professional busy with image processing tasks and problems. In the computer vision community there is a widespread belief that artificial vision systems faithfully…
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…
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.
In this theoretical work the temporal aspect of consciousness is analyzed. We start from the notion that while conscious experience seems to change constantly, yet for any of its contents to be consciously perceived they must last for some…
Embodiment has recently enjoyed renewed consideration as a means to amplify the faculties of smart machines. Proponents of embodiment seem to imply that optimizing for movement in physical space promotes something more than the acquisition…
The "mind-brain supervenience" conjecture suggests that all mental properties are derived from the physical properties of the brain. To address the question of whether the mind supervenes on the brain, we frame a supervenience hypothesis in…
Consciousness is the window of the brain and reflects many fundamental cognitive properties involving both computational and cognitive mechanisms. A collection of these properties was described as the "easy problems" by Chalmers, including…
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have…
This paper aims to show that a simple framework, utilizing basic formalisms from set theory and category theory, can clarify and inform our theories of the relation between mind and matter.
Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…
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…
If our universe has appeared in a result of Big Bang or something like this, whether we have reasons to deny an existence of other universes appearing by the same or similar way? An objection that there is no anything like it, is doubtful,…
Physical symbol systems are needed for open-ended cognition. A good way to understand physical symbol systems is by comparison of thought to chemistry. Both have systematicity, productivity and compositionality. The state of the art in…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
This paper presents a novel information-theoretic proof demonstrating that the human brain as currently understood cannot function as a classical digital computer. Through systematic quantification of distinguishable conscious states and…
In this brief note I argue that putting conscious observers at the center of the considerations clarifies and strengthens the many-worlds interpretation. The basic assumption, which seems extremely plausible based on our current…