Consciousness Studies

Consider:
Excerpt: " Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a momen... View MoreConsider:
Excerpt: " Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?
Indeed, Jonathan Schooler has established a clear distinction between conscious and meta-conscious processes. Whereas both types entail the qualities of experience, meta-conscious processes also entail what he called re-representation. “Periodically attention is directed towards explicitly assessing the contents of experience. The resulting meta-consciousness involves an explicit re-representation of consciousness in which one interprets, describes or otherwise characterizes the state of one’s mind.
So where attention plays an important role is in re-representation; that is, the conscious knowledge of an experience, which underlies introspection. Subjects cannot report—not even to themselves—experiences that aren’t re-represented. Nothing, however, stops conscious experience from occurring without re-representation: Dreams, for instance, have been shown to lack re-representation, despite the undeniable fact they are experienced in consciousness. This gap between reportability and the contents of consciousness has motivated the emergence of so-called “no-report paradigms” in the modern neuroscience of consciousness.
Clearly, the assumption that consciousness is limited to re-represented mental contents under the focus of attention mistakenly conflates meta-consciousness with consciousness proper. Yet, this conflation is disturbingly widespread. Consider Axel Cleeremans’s words: “Awareness…always seems to minimally entail the ability of knowing that one knows. This ability, after all, forms the basis for the verbal reports we take to be the most direct indication of awareness. And when we observe the absence of such ability to report on the knowledge involved in our decisions, we rightfully conclude the decision was based on unconscious knowledge.”

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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than You Think

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Awareness can be part of it, but it’s much more than that

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"Some cryogenics researchers are looking at methods of freezing the brain’s memory apparatus in the hope of reviving it one day and saving it as an artificial intelligence."

Does Freezing the Brain’s “... View More

Does Freezing the Brain’s “Connectome” Offer Hope of Immortality?

mindmatters.ai

The question cryogenics raises is, can we freeze and then recover consciousness itself as opposed to simply saving imprints of a person’s memories as an AI?

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If You Transplant a Human Head, Does Its Consciousness Follow?

www.wired.com

In her new book, Brandy Schillace recalls the unbelievable legacy of a Cold War era neurosurgeon’s mission to preserve the soul.

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The Universe Might Be One Big Neural Network, Study Finds

www.popularmechanics.com

It’s a lot to process.

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What kind of brain activity could carry out a global workspace (GW) function?

medium.com

An important new article by Professors Gustavo Deco, Diego Vidaurre, and Morton L. Kringelbach has advanced the debate about consciousness considered as a kind of “theater” or “global workspace.” The…

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What Is Consciousness? Scientists Compete to Find Out

www.bloomberg.com

Most famously, the French philosopher Rene Descartes expressed it as “cogito, ergo sum”.

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Exploring Consciousness with 10 Sanskrit words in ways that English can’t – Sanskriti - Hinduism and Indian Culture Website

www.sanskritimagazine.com

Panini, in roughly 500 BC, standardized Sanskrit as a language through his extensive book titled ‘Ashtadhyayi’. An ambiguous version of the language existed

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The brain network driving changes in consciousness

medicalxpress.com

The loss and return of consciousness is linked to the same network of brain regions for both sleep and anesthesia, according to new research published in JNeurosci.

Michael likes this.

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"How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the center of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives ... View More

Visual illusion that may help explain consciousness—new study

medicalxpress.com

How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the center of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives u...

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I think they're both shit.

Two rival theories of consciousness are put to the test (Integrated Information Theory vs Global Workspace Theory)
Dr Tononi, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, thinks c... View MoreI think they're both shit.

Two rival theories of consciousness are put to the test (Integrated Information Theory vs Global Workspace Theory)
Dr Tononi, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, thinks consciousness is a direct consequence of the interconnectedness of neurons within brains. IIT argues that the more the neurons in a being’s brain interact with one another, and the more complex the resulting network is, the more the being in question feels itself to be conscious. Because the parts of a human brain where neuronal connectivity is most complex are the sensory processing areas (in particular, the visual cortex) at the back of the organ, these, IIT predicts, are where human consciousness will be seated.
Dr Dehaene, who works at the Collège de France, in Paris, reckons by contrast that the action, when it comes to consciousness, involves a network of brain areas—particularly the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain receives sensory information from elsewhere in the organ, evaluates and edits it, and then sends the edited version out to other areas, to be acted on. It is the activity of evaluating, editing and broadcasting which, according to GWT, generates feelings of consciousness.
One difference between IIT and GWT, accordingly, is that the former is a “bottom up” explanation, whereas the latter is “top down”. Supporters of IIT think consciousness is an emergent property of neural complexity that can exist to different degrees, and could, in principle, be measured as a number (for which they use the Greek letter phi). GWT-type consciousness, by contrast, is more of an all-or-nothing affair. Distinguishing between the two would be a big step forward for science.
Half the data collected will be analysed immediately, by researchers independent of the protagonists, who have no axe to grind for either side. The other half will be locked away for future reference, in case confirmatory analyses need to be done.
In the spirit of adversarial collaboration, the two sides have hammered out a set of tests that both agree should produce different results, depending on which theory is correct. These depend on the fact that GWT predicts brain activity only when attention is actively being paid to something, whereas mere conscious awareness of something is enough for IIT to predict activity.

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Two rival theories of consciousness are put to the test

www.economist.com

The aim is to learn more about the basis of consciousness in the brain