Related papers: A thought experiment on consciousness
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
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…
Church's hypothesis and Godel's theorem may provide constraints on mental processes.As a relief quantum entanglement may lead to a definite proposal as regards the nature of reality and how much of it we are able to know and how do we know…
To further advance our understanding of the brain, new concepts and theories are needed. In particular, the ability of the brain to create information flows must be reconciled with its propensity for synchronization and mass action. The…
The machinery of the human brain -- analog, probabilistic, embodied -- can be characterized computationally, but what machinery confers what computational powers? Any such system can be abstractly cast in terms of two computational…
Theory of Mind is commonly defined as the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, goals) to oneself, and to others. A large body of previous work - from the social sciences to artificial intelligence - has observed that Theory of…
Contemporary quantum mechanical description of nature involves two processes. The first is a dynamical process governed by the equations of local quantum field theory. This process is local and deterministic, but it generates a structure…
The hard problem of consciousness is the question how subjective experience arises from brain matter. I suggest exploring the possibility that quantum physics could be part of the answer. The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective…
Enormous questions still loom for the emerging science of spontaneous thought: what, exactly, is spontaneous thought? Why does our brain engage in spontaneous forms of thinking, and when is this most likely to occur? And perhaps the…
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence necessitate a re-examination of the epistemological foundations upon which we attribute consciousness. As AI systems increasingly mimic human behavior and interaction with high fidelity, the concept…
We tackle the problem of consciousness by taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems such as human bodies self-organize to hierarchically interpret…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
The brain is a powerful tool used to achieve amazing feats. There have been several significant advances in neuroscience and artificial brain research in the past two decades. This article is a review of such advances, ranging from the…
Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a…
A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…
What is it about human brains that allows us to reason symbolically whereas most other animals cannot? There is evidence that dynamic binding, the ability to combine neurons into groups on the fly, is necessary for symbolic thought, but…
In contrast to the critical brain hypothesis in which the brain tunes itself to a critical point between $states$ of chaos and order, analysis of Coordination Dynamics suggests that a vast repertoire of $coexisting$ $tendencies$ exists for…
I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our…
At the core of our uniquely human cognitive abilities is the capacity to see things from different perspectives, or to place them in a new context. We propose that this was made possible by two cognitive transitions. First, the large brain…
I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…