Tag Archives: affect consciousness

The response schema

Posted on March 4, 2020 by

Several months ago Michael Graziano, and colleagues, attempted a synthesis of three families of scientific theories of consciousness: global workspace theory (GWT), higher order theory (HOT), and his own attention schema theory (AST). A quick (crudely simplistic) reminder: GWT posits … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , | 42 Comments

Joseph LeDoux’s theories on consciousness and emotions

Posted on September 5, 2019 by

In the last post, I mentioned that I was reading Joseph LeDoux’s new book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this book.  As its title … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 119 Comments

The reflex and the feeling

Posted on August 22, 2019 by

Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel have an interesting article at Aeon on emotions.  Their main thesis is that many emotions are biological, universal, and rooted in evolution.  And that they arise through “the strata of consciousness”: the physiological, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Zeitgeist | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

Protecting AI welfare?

Posted on April 27, 2019 by

John Basl and Eric Schwitzgebel have a short article at Aeon arguing that AI (artificial intelligence) should enjoy the same protection as animals do for scientific research.  They make the point that while AI is a long way off from … Continue reading →

Posted in Zeitgeist | Tagged , , , , | 55 Comments

On imagination, feelings, and brain regions

Posted on November 11, 2018 by

The last post on feelings generated some excellent conversations.  In a couple of them, it was pointed out that my description of feelings put a lot of work on the concept of imagination, and that maybe I should expand on … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , | 64 Comments

The construction of feelings

Posted on October 28, 2018 by

I’ve had a number of conversations lately on the subject of feelings, the affective states of having valences about conscious perception, such as fear, pain, joy, hunger, etc.  Apparently a lot of people view feelings as a very mysterious phenomenon.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Mind and AI | Tagged , , , , , , | 124 Comments