Lifeboat Foundation

In this clip from our 2017 event titled ‘Evolution of the Mind, Consciousness and AI,’ the esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett is joined by a group of panellists to explore how much we understand about the human mind, and what the creation of artificial consciousness means for our future. Watch and let us know in the comments if you think Dennett’s theories still hold true in light of the rapid developments in AI since he joined us.

See the full session here: • Daniel Dennett on the Evolution of th…

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With anaesthetics and brain organoids, we are finally testing whether quantum effects can explain consciousness. We may have misunderstood this long-derided idea, says George Musser.

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. There are three basic types of corresponding approaches: consciousness is a manifestation of quantum processes in the brain, quantum concepts are used to understand consciousness without referring to brain activity, and matter and consciousness are regarded as dual aspects of one underlying reality. Major contemporary variants of these quantum-inspired approaches will be discussed.

The possibility of direct interfacing between biological and technological information devices could result in a merger of mind and machine — Ultimate Computing. This book, a thorough consideration of this idea, involves a number of disciplines, including biochemistry, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, mathematics, microbiology, molecular biology, pharmacology, philosophy, physics, physiology, and psychology.

A solid theory of human consciousness eludes us, which is why seemingly fringe ideas such as those that rely on quantum effects in the brain are still worth pursuing.

Consciousness is one of the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of human existence. It is also one of the most challenging to study scientifically, as it involves subjective experiences that are not directly observable or measurable. David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at NYU mentions in his book The Conscious Mind.

“It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.”

The real questions are: how can we approach the problem of consciousness from a rigorous and objective perspective? Is there a way to quantify and model the phenomena of awareness, feelings, thoughts, and selfhood? There is no definitive answer to this question, but some researchers have attempted to use mathematical tools and methods to study these phenomena. Self-awareness, for instance, is the ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, such as your personality, actions, values, beliefs, and even thoughts. Some studies have used the mirror test to assess the development of self-awareness in infants and animals.

The purpose of the attention schema theory is to explain how an information-processing device, the brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The theory is offered as a possible starting point for building artificial consciousness. Given current technology, it should be possible to build a machine that contains a rich internal model of what consciousness is, attributes that property of consciousness to itself and to the people it interacts with, and uses that attribution to make predictions about human behavior. Such a machine would “believe” it is conscious and act like it is conscious, in the same sense that the human machine believes and acts.

This article is part of a special issue on consciousness in humanoid robots. The purpose of this article is to summarize the attention schema theory (AST) of consciousness for those in the engineering or artificial intelligence community who may not have encountered previous papers on the topic, which tended to be in psychology and neuroscience journals. The central claim of this article is that AST is mechanistic, demystifies consciousness and can potentially provide a foundation on which artificial consciousness could be engineered. The theory has been summarized in detail in other articles (e.g., Graziano and Kastner, 2011; Webb and Graziano, 2015) and has been described in depth in a book (Graziano, 2013). The goal here is to briefly introduce the theory to a potentially new audience and to emphasize its possible use for engineering artificial consciousness.

The AST was developed beginning in 2010, drawing on basic research in neuroscience, psychology, and especially on how the brain constructs models of the self (Graziano, 2010, 2013; Graziano and Kastner, 2011; Webb and Graziano, 2015). The main goal of this theory is to explain how the brain, a biological information processor, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The theory is in the realm of science and engineering.

Consciousness, “What It’s Like To Be…,” and “subjective experiences” can be explained by the Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR).\

We propose that a minimal primitive mind would need only to \.

My first Great Problems lecture will be on the Mind-Body problem and David Chalmers “hard problem.” See consciousness, panpsychism pages on I-phi website.