Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
I think the brain is a computational system and what we generally refer to as the mind and consciousness are some of its computations. But I'm also aware that the brain works very differently from how a typical digital computer works. One criticism of computationalism that I have some sympathy with is the word "computation" … Continue reading The unity of storage and processing in nervous systems
Eric Schwitzgebel had an interesting paper come out this week, exploring the question of whether there can be cases of borderline consciousness, that is, cases where a system is neither determinately conscious nor determinately non-conscious. For example, maybe humans, dogs, and cats are determinately conscious, rocks and protons are determinately not conscious, but something like … Continue reading Borderline consciousness?
It's been an interesting week in consciousness studies. It started with Steve Fleming doing a blog post, a follow up to one he'd done earlier expressing his concerns about how the results of the adversarial collaboration between global neuronal workspace (GNW) and integrated information theory (IIT) were portrayed in the science media. GNW sees consciousness … Continue reading Integrated information theory as pseudoscience?
Adam Mastroianni has a post that's getting a pretty good amount of attention. Mastroianni discusses recent claims of fraud in psychology, as well as the replication crisis. But his actual topic is how little difference it makes when most of the studies in question are removed from the scientific record. The overall gist is that … Continue reading Solving a problem requires not banishing the possible solutions
An interesting preprint was released this week: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness. The paper is long and has has sixteen authors, although two: Patrick Butlin and Robert Long, are flagged as the primaries. The list of contributors includes Jonathan Birch, Stephen Fleming, Grace Lindsay, Matthias Michel, and Eric Schwitzgebel, all … Continue reading How to tell if AI is conscious
Zach Weinersmith is a man after my own heart when it comes to consciousness, as today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows. As the consciousness is in the eye of the beholder and hierarchy of definitions guy, I feel this comic. It also resonates with Jacy Reese Anthis' conscious semanticism outlook. Click through for the original … Continue reading SMBC: Consciousness: a definition thing
On Twitter, the Neuroskeptic shared a new paper, in which an Israeli team claims to have demonstrated phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness: Experiencing without knowing? Empirical evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access. A quick reminder. In the 1990s Ned Block famously made a distinction between phenomenal consciousness (p-consciousness) and access consciousness (a-consciousness). P-consciousness is conceptualized … Continue reading Experiencing without knowing?
A few years ago it was announced that The Templeton Foundation was funding an adversarial collaboration on theories of consciousness. The initial plan was to pit Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) against Integrated Information Theory (IIT), although the initiative plans to move on to other theories once these have been tested. Early on, I had … Continue reading Workspace vs integration: results starting to come in
This is a long video. The first hour or so features presentations on the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory by Stanislas Dehaene, Recurrent Processing Theory by Victor Lamme, Higher Order Thought Theory by Steve Fleming, and Integration Information Theory by Melanie Boly. It also has some brief recorded remarks from Anil Seth on Predictive Coding. (Fleming … Continue reading The Great Consciousness Debate: ASSC 25
I recently did a post on Riccardo Manzotti’s interesting IAI article: There is no problem of consciousness (warning: possible paywall). In that article, Manzotti described his Mind Object Identity hypothesis. He also published a paper on this idea in 2019, which goes into much more detail. A quick recap. We make a mistake, he argues, in trying to … Continue reading Q&A on the Mind Object Identity hypothesis
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