Related papers: A thought experiment on consciousness
The brain is composed of electrically excitable neuronal networks regulated by the activity of voltage-gated ion channels. Further portraying the molecular composition of the brain, however, will not reveal anything remotely reminiscent of…
This paper explores the hard problem of consciousness from a different perspective. Instead of drawing distinctions between the physical and the mental, an exploration of a more foundational relationship is examined: the relationship…
Some contributions of physics towards the understanding of consciousness are described. As recent relevant models, associative memory neural networks are mentioned. It is shown that consciousness and quantum physics share some properties.…
We address the relation between two apparently distinct problems: The quest for a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness and the search for time and space as emergent structures in the quantum mechanical world. We also advance…
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
The free energy principle has been proposed as a unifying account of brain function. It is closely related, and in some cases subsumes, earlier unifying ideas such as Bayesian inference, predictive coding, and active learning. This article…
The work demonstrates that brain might reflect the external world causal relationships in the form of a logically consistent and prognostic model of reality, which shows up as consciousness. The paper analyses and solves the problem of…
One of the most fundamental questions in Biology or Artificial Intelligence is how the human brain performs mathematical functions. How does a neural architecture that may organise itself mostly through statistics, know what to do? One…
The Neurobiology Of Thinking, Identity, And Geniality Abstract: Mathematically the axioms of representation are subtle, and critical. The CNS expresses its function via its internal neuronal networks in multidimensional, intrinsic frames.…
In this paper, we will argue that if we want to understand the function of the brain (or the control in the case of robots), we must understand how the brain is embedded into the physical system, and how the organism interacts with the real…
The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative,…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
The human brain processes a wide variety of inputs and does so either consciously or subconsciously. According to the Global Workspace theory, conscious processing involves broadcasting of information to several regions of the brain and…
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…
It has for ages been a rather constant feature of thinking in science to take it for granted that the respective thinking happens in realms which are totally outside and independent of all the other phenomena that constitute the objects of…
Scientific theories of consciousness should be falsifiable and non-trivial. Recent research has given us formal tools to analyze these requirements of falsifiability and non-triviality for theories of consciousness. Surprisingly, many…
We claim that human mathematics is only a limited part of the consequences of the chosen basic axioms. Properly human mathematics varies with time but appears to have universal features which we try to analyze. In particular the functioning…
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A…
It has been proposed that human physical reasoning consists largely of running "physics engines in the head" in which the future trajectory of the physical system under consideration is computed precisely using accurate scientific theories.…