One of the ongoing debates in neuroscience is on the nature of emotions, where they originate, where they are felt, and how innate versus learned they are. One view, championed by the late Jaak Panksepp and his followers, see emotions as innate, primal, and subcortical. They allow that the more complex social emotions, such as … Continue reading The layers of emotional feelings
The barrier of meaning
In the post on the Chinese room, while concluding that Searle's overall thesis isn't demonstrated, I noted that if he had restricted himself to a more limited assertion, he might have had a point, that the Turing test doesn't guarantee a system actually understands its subject matter. Although the probability of humans being fooled plummets … Continue reading The barrier of meaning
Debate: Do split-brain patients have two minds?
I went to the NYU Consciousness site this morning hoping to see if the recent debate on the relationship of prefrontal activity to consciousness had been posted yet. It hasn't, and based on what I can see, it might be a while. But I did find this interesting debate from last year on whether split … Continue reading Debate: Do split-brain patients have two minds?
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 problems with the Chinese room argument
In 1950, Alan Turing published a seminal paper on machine intelligence (which is available online). Turing ponders whether machines can think. However, he pretty much immediately abandons this initial question as hopelessly metaphysical and replaces it with another question that can be approached scientifically: can a machine ever convince us that it's thinking? Turing posits … Continue reading The problems with the Chinese room argument
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
Integrated information theory
I think most of you know I'm not a fan of integrated information theory (IIT). However, it is a theory proposed by scientists, and I've always had a mildly guilty conscience over not having read about it other than through articles and papers. Some years ago, I tried to read Giuilio Tononi's book, PHI: A Voyage … Continue reading Integrated information theory
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
A competition between integration and workspace
Back in March, I did a post on a proposed Templeton Foundation project to test major scientific theories of consciousness. The idea was to start with a head to head competition between the integration information theory (IIT) and global workspace theory (GWT). Apparently that project got funded and, according to a Science Magazine article, there … Continue reading A competition between integration and workspace
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