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…
From the introduction to Chapter 9 of his new book The Strange Order of Things. “The term ‘consciousness’ applies to the very natural but distinctive kind of mental state described by the above [subjective] traits. The mental state allows its owner to be the private experiencer of the world around and, just as important, to experience aspects of his or her own being. For practical purposes, the universe of knowledge, current and past, that can be conjured up in a…
During our next discussion meeting, we’ll explore the status, future potential, and human implications of neuroprostheses–particularly brain-computer interfaces. If you are local to Albuquerque, check our Meetup announcement to join or RSVP. The announcement text follows. Focal questions What are neuroprostheses? How are they used now and what may the future hold for technology-enhanced sensation, motor control, communications, cognition, and other human processes? Resources (please review before the meeting) Primary resources • New Brain-Computer Interface Technology (video, 18 m) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgFzmE2fGXA • Imagining…
The main title is “The serpent’s gift,” Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). A copy can be found at this link. A copy of this chapter can be found here. The abstract: “As a higher-order cognitive system enabling access to intentional states, and one that few (if any) other species even marginally possess, consciousness or, more appropriately, self-consciousness has likely been both selectively advantageous and the source of adaptive conflict in human evolutionary…
See this study. The blurb: “New brain published in the journal Scientific Reports sheds new light on how LSD produces its psychedelic effects. The drug resulted in the ’emergence of new type of order in the brain,’ the researchers found. The study used a new mathematical method to analyze brain activity, known as connectome-harmonic decomposition, to examine how LSD caused alterations in consciousness. A connectome is a distinctive pattern of neural connections — like a wiring diagram of the brain.”
Check the details on our Monday, Feb 5, 2018 discussion meeting: https://www.meetup.com/abq_brain_mind_consciousness_AI/events/248166633/
This is from a review/analysis of Damasio’s book Self Comes to Mind: “On Page 8 he says, ‘I believe that conscious minds arise when a self process is added to a basic mind process.’ So, in Damasio’s view the difference between mind and consciousness is all about the self. He defines ‘mind’ as the process by which the brain creates images based on its maps, both of the body and of the world. But he says that the mind is…
See Dan Brown talking about it in this video. He is also co-author in the paper “Mapping complex mind states.” Some excerpts from the latter follow. Note that it does not differentiate the different aspect of ‘self’ as discussed by Damasio. It appears that what it means by ‘self’ is the autobiographical self-reference system. However Damasio would see some of these results as examples of the proto-self and core self. This neuroscience article compares Damasio’s different types of self to…
Good article discussing an interview except with Jordan Greenhall on global collapse, with that excerpt also provided. We are headed for collapse unless we as a species upgrade our decision making by “becoming much better at self-organizing into large-scale manifestations of collective intelligence.” Greenhall is co-founder of Neurohacker Collective. Their mission statement: “Our mission is to use the best of what we know about how the brain and mind work from all fields and disciplines in the service of realizing humanity’s deepest…
A Guardian article last October brings the darker aspects of the attention economy, particularly the techniques and tools of neural hijacking, into sharp focus. The piece summarizes some interaction design principles and trends that signal a fundamental shift in means, deployment, and startling effectiveness of mass persuasion. The mechanisms reliably and efficiently leverage neural reward (dopamine) circuits to seize, hold, and direct attention toward whatever end the designer and content providers choose. The organizer of a $1,700 per person event…