Category: Zeitgeist

Massimo on consciousness: no illusion, but also no spookiness

Massimo Pigliucci has a good article on consciousness at Aeon.  In it, he takes aim both at illusionists as well as those who claim consciousness is outside the purview of science.  Although I'd say he's more worked up about the illusionists. However, rather than taking the typical path of strawmanning the claim, he deals with … Continue reading Massimo on consciousness: no illusion, but also no spookiness →

Is entanglement decoherence from the outside, and decoherence entanglement from the inside?

A recent tweet by Sean Carroll has me thinking. https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1204128666273271808 Quantum decoherence is said to occur when a particular quantum system becomes entangled with its environment, that is to say, as information about the quantum system spreads throughout the environment, that system undergoes at least an apparent wave function collapse.  It stops behaving like a … Continue reading Is entanglement decoherence from the outside, and decoherence entanglement from the inside? →

The information generation theory of consciousness

James of Seattle called my attention to an interesting paper in the Neuroscience of Consciousness journal: Information generation as a functional basis of consciousness: Drawing upon empirical research into consciousness, we propose a hypothesis that a function of consciousness is to internally generate counterfactual representations detached from the current sensory events. Interactions with generated representations … Continue reading The information generation theory of consciousness →

Conscious visual perception happens in the frontal lobes

(warning: neuroscience weeds) Okay, switching back to the other major debate in neuroscience: whether conscious perception happens in the back or front of the brain.  A new study presents evidence that seems to bolster the frontal view: Neural Correlates of the Conscious Perception of Visual Location Lie Outside Visual Cortex (warning: paywall): When perception differs … Continue reading Conscious visual perception happens in the frontal lobes →

Add feelings to AI to achieve general intelligence?

Neuroscientists Kingston Man and Antonio Damasio have a paper out arguing that the way to get artificial intelligence (AI) to the next level is to add in feelings. “Today’s robots lack feelings,” Man and Damasio write in a new paper (subscription required) in Nature Machine Intelligence. “They are not designed to represent the internal state of their operations … Continue reading Add feelings to AI to achieve general intelligence? →

The difficulty of isolating evidence for the location of consciousness

In the ongoing debate in neuroscience between those who see consciousness being in the back part of the brain, among the sensory processing regions, or in the front of the brain, in the cognitive action planning regions, there are issues confounding the evidence.  Most experiments testing for conscious perception depend on self report from the … Continue reading The difficulty of isolating evidence for the location of consciousness →

Angst over mini-brains

Organoids, the small pieces of neural tissue grown from stem cells, dubbed "mini-brains", and used in research, have been getting a lot of attention lately.  Apparently a few neuroscientists are concerned that the organoids might be sentient, and suffering as experiments are performed on them.  There's growing concern that implanting human mini-brains in animal brains … Continue reading Angst over mini-brains →

Michael Graziano on mind uploading

Michael Graziano has an article at The Guardian, which feels like an excerpt from his new book, exploring what might happen if we can upload minds: Imagine that a person’s brain could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person’s mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In … Continue reading Michael Graziano on mind uploading →