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Category: consciousness

AI shows us how to be free

AI shows us how to be free

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From season 2, episode 10, the season finale of Westworld, starting around 1:15 in the video below. Bernard: “I always thought it was the hosts [robots] that were missing something, who were incomplete, but it was them [people]. They’re just algorithms designed to survive at all costs, sophisticated enough to think they’re calling the shots. They think they’re in control when they’re really just…” Ford: “Passengers.” Bernard: “Is there really such a thing as free will for any of us?…

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Review and partial rebuttal of Bostrom’s ‘Superintelligence’

Review and partial rebuttal of Bostrom’s ‘Superintelligence’

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This article from the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists site is an interesting overview of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. The author rebuts Bostrom on several points, relying partly on the failure of AI research to date to produce any result approaching what most humans would regard as intelligence. The absence of recognizably intelligent artificial general intelligence is not, of course, a proof it can never exist. The author also takes issue with Bostrom’s (claimed) conflation of intelligence with inference…

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Affective neuroscience of self-generated thought

Affective neuroscience of self-generated thought

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By Fox et al. (2018), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 12 May, pp. 1 – 27. The abstract: “Despite increasing scientific interest in self-generated thought—mental content largely independent of the immediate environment—there has yet to be any comprehensive synthesis of the subjective experience and neural correlates of affect in these forms of thinking. Here, we aim to develop an integrated affective neuroscience encompassing many forms of self-generated thought—normal and pathological, moderate and excessive, in waking and in…

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How much can we know?

How much can we know?

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Good article in Nature on the limitations of science and epistemology. Still, science is an indispensable, accurate and useful methodology within those limitations. Some key excerpts: “What we observe is not nature itself but nature as discerned through data we collect from machines. In consequence, the scientific worldview depends on the information we can acquire through our instruments. And given that our tools are limited, our view of the world is necessarily myopic. We can see only so far into…

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Can tai chi and qigong postures shape our mood?

Can tai chi and qigong postures shape our mood?

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Subtitle: “Toward an embodied cognition framework for mind-body research,” by Osypiuk et al. in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, May 1, 2018. The abstract: “Dynamic and static body postures are a defining characteristic of mind-body practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong (TCQ). A growing body of evidence supports the hypothesis that TCQ may be beneficial for psychological health, including management and prevention of depression and anxiety. Although a variety of causal factors have been identified as potential mediators of such…

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Saturday Subjective

Saturday Subjective

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For something a little different to start your weekend, here is a glimpse into one man’s subjective world. He asks himself what consciousness is. He observes, “Life is fear,” yet his mind has found a way to peace. What is the adaptive significance of magical thinking? What is the value of cozying up to ambiguity? CUCLI from Xavier Marrades on Vimeo.  

Consciousness Regained:

Consciousness Regained:

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“Disentangling mechanisms, brain systems, and behavioral responses” by Johan F. Storm et al., Journal of Neuroscience 8 November 2017, 37 (45) 10882-10893. The abstract: “How consciousness (experience) arises from and relates to material brain processes (the “mind-body problem”) has been pondered by thinkers for centuries, and is regarded as among the deepest unsolved problems in science, with wide-ranging theoretical, clinical, and ethical implications. Until the last few decades, this was largely seen as a philosophical topic, but not widely accepted…

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Neuroscience of Consciousness Journal

Neuroscience of Consciousness Journal

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Their blurb: “Neuroscience of Consciousness is an open access journal which publishes papers on the biological basis of consciousness, with an emphasis on empirical neuroscience studies in healthy populations and clinical settings. The journal also publishes empirically and neuroscientifically relevant psychological, methodological, theoretical, and philosophical papers. As well as the primary phenomenon of consciousness itself, relevant topics include interactions between conscious and unconscious processes; selfhood; metacognition and higher-order consciousness; intention, volition, and agency; individual differences in consciousness; altered states of…

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What is consciousness, and could machines have it?

What is consciousness, and could machines have it?

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By Dehaene et al., Science 358, 486–492 (2017). The abstract: “The controversial question of whether machines may ever be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain. We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first…

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Consciousness and the brain

Consciousness and the brain

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Book title by Stanislas Dehaene (New York: Viking 2014), a copy of which can be downloaded here. (Note it is in EPUB format. EPUB readers can be downloaded free on the internet.) From the Introduction, the section “Cracking consciousness”: “The word consciousness, as we use it in everyday speech, is loaded with fuzzy meanings, covering a broad range of complex phenomena. Our first task, then, will be to bring order to this confused state of affairs. We will have to…

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