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Search results for 'a lifeboat for consciousness': Page 15

Jul 24, 2023

What happens to the brain during consciousness-ending meditation?

Posted by in category: neuroscience

There’s a meditative state described in ancient Buddhist scriptures that is hard to imagine because it is not something – but nothing. Referred to as nirodha-samāpatti, it roughly translates as ‘the cessation of thought and feeling’, and it is the highest meditative state possible in Theravada Buddhism, following eight others called jhānas. Each jhāna requires deepening levels of concentration, and a retreat into the mind, away from typical consciousness.

According to David Vago, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and director of the Contemplative Neuroscience and Mind-Body Research Laboratory, nirodha-samāpatti refers to a ‘state of profound concentration or absorption in which all mental activity is temporarily suspended’. It’s said that the state leads to a total absence of sensation and awareness, which would help explain the stories of monks who stayed in this deep trance while fires burned around them.

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Jul 22, 2023

Consciousness in a Rotor? Science and Ethics of Potentially Conscious Human Cerebral Organoids

Posted by in categories: ethics, robotics/AI, science

Human cerebral organoids are three-dimensional biological cultures grown in the laboratory to mimic as closely as possible the cellular composition, structure, and function of the corresponding organ, the brain. For now, cerebral organoids lack blood vessels and other characteristics of the human brain, but are also capable of having coordinated electrical activity. They have been usefully employed for the study of several diseases and the development of the nervous system in unprecedented ways. Research on human cerebral organoids is proceeding at a very fast pace and their complexity is bound to improve. This raises the question of whether cerebral organoids will also be able to develop the unique feature of the human brain, consciousness. If this is the case, some ethical issues would arise. In this article, we discuss the necessary neural correlates and constraints for the emergence of consciousness according to some of the most debated neuroscientific theories. Based on this, we consider what the moral status of a potentially conscious brain organoid might be, in light of ethical and ontological arguments. We conclude by proposing a precautionary principle and some leads for further investigation. In particular, we consider the outcomes of some very recent experiments as entities of a potential new kind.

Jul 21, 2023

Is this hat conscious? | Ben Goertzel on consciousness, panpsychism, and AGI | Big Think

Posted by in categories: finance, robotics/AI, singularity, space

Is this hat conscious?
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Panpsychism is the idea that there is an element of consciousness in everything in the universe. The theory goes like this: You’re conscious. Ben Goertzel is conscious. And his hat is conscious too. What if consciousness isn’t about the brain at all, but it’s as inherent to our universe as space-time?“Now, panpsychism, to me, is not even that interesting, it’s almost obvious — it’s just the foundation, the beginning for thinking about consciousness… ” says Goertzel. It’s what comes after that excites him, like the emerging technology that will let us connect our minds to bricks, hats, earthworms, other humans, and super AGIs like Sophia, and perhaps glimpse at the fabric of consciousness. Goertzel believes brain-brain interfacing and brain-computer interfacing will unfold in the coming decades, and it’s by that means that we may finally crack the nut of consciousness to discover whether panpsychism makes any sense, and to learn why humans are so differently conscious than, for example, his hat.

Continue reading “Is this hat conscious? | Ben Goertzel on consciousness, panpsychism, and AGI | Big Think” »

Jul 20, 2023

A Dive into the Mysteries of Perception and Consciousness

Posted by in category: neuroscience

The researchers suggest that they may have located the brain region where images are held during the moments we consciously perceive them.

Jul 19, 2023

Cracking consciousness will never be easy but we are making strides

Posted by in category: neuroscience

A new way to understand where consciousness comes from and novel insights into subjective thought show that the hard problem of consciousness is worth persevering with.

Jul 19, 2023

Neutral Monism and the Scientific Study of Consciousness (William Seager)

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Abstract: A scientific theory of consciousness could be merely descriptive, nothing more than a kind of empirical, statistical phenomenology. We already have a lot of data which fit into this kind of modest theorizing. Better would be a theory which reveals the nature of consciousness. Here a famous gap looms between any such theory of consciousness and a theory of the conscious brain, neither of which are actually in our possession. The gap is so serious and so immense that it has led to remarkable responses, such as the illusionist view that consciousness does not exist. I think the gap suggests there are lurking assumptions about the nature of both consciousness and matter which are fundamentally at odds with one another. A ‘neutral monist’ view may be able to avoid these assumptions to find a place in nature for consciousness and scientific theorizing about it.

Jul 19, 2023

Study provides clues to the neural basis of consciousness

Posted by in categories: food, neuroscience

More than a quarter of all stroke victims develop a bizarre disorder -; they lose conscious awareness of half of all that their eyes perceive.

After a stroke in the brain’s right half, for example, a person might eat only what’s on the right side of the plate because they’re unaware of the other half. The person may see only the right half of a photo and ignore a person on their left side.

Surprisingly, though, such stroke victims can emotionally react to the entire photo or scene. Their brains seem to be taking it all in, but these people are consciously aware of only half the world.

Jul 13, 2023

The Hard Problems of Consciousness and Psychology

Posted by in category: neuroscience

The problem of psychology is more important than the problem of consciousness.

Jul 1, 2023

Scientists Unveil New Results in Hunt to Pinpoint the Seat of Consciousness

Posted by in category: neuroscience

It found that consciousness may emerge from a grid-like interconnection of neurons at the back of the head.

Launched in 2019, the $20 million project, COGITATE, sought to explore an age-old question: how does consciousness arise? The “outlandish” project threw the field into a tizzy for its audacity. But it set up a fair fight: the teams collaborated on specific experiment designs, published them online, and pre-registered predicted results based on each of their championed theories.

Human brain scan data was then collected from six theory-neutral labs around the world, with the results judged by three experts with no money in the game to see how well the measured results matched predicted ones.

Jul 1, 2023

David Nutt: entropy explains consciousness

Posted by in category: neuroscience

In response to Bernardo Kastrup’s scathing criticisms of materialist explanations of the states of consciousness induced by psychedelics, David Nutt argues that we don’t need to adopt an untestable metaphysical worldview to explain the subjective richness of psychedelic experiences.In response to Bernardo Kastrup’s scathing criticisms of materialist explanations of the states of consciousness induced by psychedelics, David Nutt argues that we don’t need to adopt an untestable metaphysical worldview to explain the subjective richness of psychedelic experiences.

Let’s start with where we agree. It doesn’t make intuitive sense that alterations in (increased) complexity of brain waves could explain the whole range of subjective experiences that are reported under the influence of psychedelics. I agree they probably don’t in a direct sense — it seems to me much more likely that they are correlated because they both derive from a common change in another system or systems. Despite Bernardo’s criticisms and scepticism, I think we can plausibly develop theories as a result of neuroscience and neuroimaging research coupled with simultaneous acquisition of subjective effects that help explain the altered state of consciousness produced by psychedelics.

Where those might be is the question — and I will come back to it later — but at this point I think it is reasonable to suggest that the primary visual hallucinations (the Christmas tree lights) probably reflect a psychiatry-induced disruption of the layer 5 neurons in the visual cortex. This would degrade the ability of the complex cortical network that creates vision by integrating retinal inputs. Physiological studies of the neuronal workings of non-human visual systems predict that simple geometric shapes, colours and movement are the primary processes that are extracted from retinal inputs and from which more complex visual schema are then created. Psychedelics disrupt these higher-level constructions so allow the user to “see” the primary workings of the visual system that are not normally accessible to consciousness.

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