Related papers: Consciousness and Endogenous State Reduction: Two …
Meditation and hypnosis both aim to facilitate cognitive-emotional flexibility, i.e., the "de-automatization" of thought and behavior. However, little research or theory has addressed how internal thought patterns might change after such…
Animals achieve sophisticated behavioral control through dynamic coupling of the brain, body, and environment. Accordingly, the co-design approach, in which both the controllers and the physical properties are optimized simultaneously, has…
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…
Correlations between psychological and physiological phenomena form the basis for different medical and scientific disciplines, but the nature of this relation has not yet been fully understood. One conceptual option is to understand the…
In previous papers, we demonstrated that an ontology of quantum mechanics, described in terms of states and events with internal phenomenal aspects (a form of panprotopsychism), is well suited to explain consciousness. We showed that the…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…
Human physical function is governed by self-efficacy, the belief in one's motor capacity. In chronic pain patients, this capacity may remain reduced long after the damage causing the pain has been cured. Chronic pain alters body schema,…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between formal physical principles and personal experience. However, research has shown that awareness of connections between…
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…
This is the second part of a paper on Conscious Intelligent Systems. We use the understanding gained in the first part (Conscious Intelligent Systems Part 1: IXI (arxiv id cs.AI/0612056)) to look at understanding. We see how the presence of…
The nRules that are developed in another paper are applied to two versions of the Schrodinger cat experiment. In version I the initially conscious cat is made unconscious by a mechanism that is initiated by a radioactive decay. In version…
In this paper we explore whether the fundamental tool of experimental psychology, the behavioral experiment, has the power to generate insight not only into humans and animals, but artificial systems too. We apply the techniques of…
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…
The oRules of state reduction are applied to the case of the Schrodinger cat experiment. It is shown that these rules can unambiguously describe the conscious state of the cat, as well as an outside observer at any time during the…
Mindfulness is the state of paying attention to the present moment on purpose and meditation is the technique to obtain this state. This study aims to develop a robot assistant that facilitates mindfulness training by means of a Brain…
Scientific studies have shown that non-conscious stimuli and representations influence information processing during conscious experience. In the light of such evidence, questions about potential functional links between non-conscious brain…
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…
Some versions of quantum theory treat wave function collapse as a fundamental physical phenomenon to be described by explicit laws. One motivation is to find a consistent unification of quantum theory and gravity, in which collapse prevents…
The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of…