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Phenomenal consciousness is defined as a subjective that experiences itself. We interpret this definition as to a quantum device that detects itself. For this purpose we suggest the definition of a hierarchy chain of spaces. The l...
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Phenomenal consciousness is defined as a subjective that experiences itself. We interpret this definition as to a quantum device that detects itself. For this purpose we suggest the definition of a hierarchy chain of spaces. The lowest space in the chain is the regular H-space. Above it stands the first-order space, which is shown to be the representative of the phenomenal consciousness
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According to a popular distinction proposed by the philosopher Ned Block in 1995, our conscious experience would overflow the very limited set of what we can consciously report to ourselves and to others. He proposed to coin this ...
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According to a popular distinction proposed by the philosopher Ned Block in 1995, our conscious experience would overflow the very limited set of what we can consciously report to ourselves and to others. He proposed to coin this limited consciousness 'Access Consciousness' (A-Cs) and to define 'Phenomenal Consciousness' as a much richer subjective experience that is not accessed but that would still delineate the extent of consciousness. In this article, I review and develop five major problems raised by this theory, and show how a strict A-Cs theory can account for our conscious experience. I illustrate such an A-Cs account within the global workspace (GW) theoretical framework, and revisit some seminal empirical findings and neuropsychological syndromes. In this strict A-Cs perspective, subjective reports are not conceived as the mere passive broadcasting of information to the GW, but as resulting from a dynamic and active chain of internal processes that notably include interpretative and belief attribution stages. Finally, I list a set of testable predictions, of unsolved questions and of some counterintuitive hypotheses.
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This article describes methods and ideas that emerged from a continuing enquiry into 'metadesign' that led us to think about the role of 'consciousness' in teams, communities and the biosphere. In the West the notion of 'conscious...
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This article describes methods and ideas that emerged from a continuing enquiry into 'metadesign' that led us to think about the role of 'consciousness' in teams, communities and the biosphere. In the West the notion of 'consciousness' has been shaped by humanism, industrialization and some strident forms of individualism. These have encouraged us to see it in strongly anthropocentric and solipsistic terms. The global economic system also reflects this individualistic ideology, given that 'growth', is driven by personal avarice on a collective scale. On the other hand, capitalism encourages enterprises to scale-up when they become successful. Both tendencies reduce the consciousness of organizations and communities. The article illustrates this idea by describing a 'quadratic' model of team consciousness that was developed to enhance practical developments that support personal, interpersonal, transpersonal and environmentally situated modes of awareness.
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L. Syd M Johnson’s article argues for caution in the clinical practices surrounding prognostication for patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). The epistemic limitations of current neuroscience and the pressures that surr...
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L. Syd M Johnson’s article argues for caution in the clinical practices surrounding prognostication for patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). The epistemic limitations of current neuroscience and the pressures that surrogates and physicians face when making decisions about continuing or withdrawing treatment create an urgency for further research into how to understand, measure, and manage quality of life in these patients. Because of this, the relationship between conscious experience and other psychological functions that would inform such a research program needs to be carefully examined.
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Abstract If the octopus were conscious, what would its consciousness be like? This paper investigates the structure octopus consciousness, if existent, is likely to exhibit. Presupposing that the configuration of an organism’s co...
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Abstract If the octopus were conscious, what would its consciousness be like? This paper investigates the structure octopus consciousness, if existent, is likely to exhibit. Presupposing that the configuration of an organism’s consciousness is correlated with that of its nervous system, it is unlikely that the structure of the sort of conscious experience that would arise from the highly decentralized octopus nervous system would bear much resemblance to those of vertebrates. In particular, octopus consciousness may not exhibit unity, which has long been assumed to be the normal or default structure of consciousness. The octopus nervous system is characterized by the following features: its three anatomically distinct components have extensive functional autonomy and little intercommunication; much of the sensory processing and motor control routines—that in vertebrates are localized in the brain—take place within the peripheral arm nervous system; and proprioception and somatotopic representation (point-for-point mapping of the body) are significantly downplayed. In this paper, I present the octopus as a highly successful biological organism in which it is plausible that the unified model of consciousness does not hold.
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Consciousness is a tremendously complex phenomenon. We examined the configurations and functions of an autonomously adaptive system that can adapt to an environment without a teacher to understand this complex phenomenon in the ea...
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Consciousness is a tremendously complex phenomenon. We examined the configurations and functions of an autonomously adaptive system that can adapt to an environment without a teacher to understand this complex phenomenon in the easiest way possible, and proposed a modeling method of consciousness on the system. In modeling of consciousness, it is important to note the difference between phenomenal consciousness and functional consciousness. To clarify the difference, a model with two layers, a physical layer and a logical layer, is proposed. The functions of primitive consciousness on the autonomously adaptive system were clarified on the model. The physical layer is composed of an artificial neural node. All signals are processed in detail by the neural nodes. Contrarily, minimum information, necessary for the system to adapt itself, selected from the physical layer composes the logical layer. The operations in the logical layer are represented by interactions between only the selected information. Our daily conscious phenomenon is expressed on the logical layer.
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In the wide field of cognitive science, there are many works on consciousness. These studies can be roughly divided into two categories, i.e., the philosophical (especially the philosophy of mind) and the scientific (especially co...
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In the wide field of cognitive science, there are many works on consciousness. These studies can be roughly divided into two categories, i.e., the philosophical (especially the philosophy of mind) and the scientific (especially cognitive neuroscience). Neuroscientists have been searching for “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCCs, cf. Koch, 2012; Tononi and Koch, 2015), an approach that prioritizes the study of the correlation between specific brain activity and aspects of consciousness, while a philosophical approach always focuses on identifying explanatory links between neural mechanisms and consciousness.
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Efforts to create computational models of consciousness have accelerated over the last two decades, creating a field that has become known as artificial consciousness. There have been two main motivations for this controversial wo...
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Efforts to create computational models of consciousness have accelerated over the last two decades, creating a field that has become known as artificial consciousness. There have been two main motivations for this controversial work: to develop a better scientific understanding of the nature of human/animal consciousness and to produce machines that genuinely exhibit conscious awareness. This review begins by briefly explaining some of the concepts and terminology used by investigators working on machine consciousness, and summarizes key neurobiological correlates of human consciousness that are particularly relevant to past computational studies. Models of consciousness developed over the last twenty years are then surveyed. These models are largely found to fall into five categories based on the fundamental issue that their developers have selected as being most central to consciousness: a global workspace, information integration, an internal self-model, higher-level representations, or attention mechanisms. For each of these five categories, an overview of past work is given, a representative example is presented in some detail to illustrate the approach, and comments are provided on the contributions and limitations of the methodology. Three conclusions are offered about the state of the field based on this review: (1) computational modeling has become an effective and accepted methodology for the scientific study of consciousness, (2) existing computational models have successfully captured a number of neurobiological, cognitive, and behavioral correlates of conscious information processing as machine simulations, and (3) no existing approach to artificial consciousness has presented a compelling demonstration of phenomenal machine consciousness, or even clear evidence that artificial phenomenal consciousness will eventually be possible. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of continuing work in this area, considering the ethical issues it raises, and making predictions concerning future developments.
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It is argued here that the phenomenon of consciousness is nothing more than a special way of a subjective internal appearance of information. To explain consciousness is to explain how this subjective internal appearance of inform...
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It is argued here that the phenomenon of consciousness is nothing more than a special way of a subjective internal appearance of information. To explain consciousness is to explain how this subjective internal appearance of information can arise in the brain. To create a conscious robot is to create subjective internal appearances of information inside the robot. Other features that are often attributed to the phenomenon of consciousness are related to the contents of consciousness and cognitive functions. The internal conscious appearance of these is caused by the mechanism that gives rise to the internal appearances in the first place. A useful conscious robot must have a variety of cognitive abilities, but these abilities alone, no matter how advanced, will not make the robot conscious; the phenomenal internal appearances must be present as well. The Haikonen Cognitive Architecture (HCA) tries to facilitate both internal appearances and cognitive functions. The experimental robot XCR-1 is the first implementation experiment with the HCA.
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