{"id":186784,"date":"2024-04-04T16:23:31","date_gmt":"2024-04-04T21:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/joscha-bach-consciousness-as-a-coherence-inducing-operator"},"modified":"2024-04-04T16:23:31","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T21:23:31","slug":"joscha-bach-consciousness-as-a-coherence-inducing-operator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/joscha-bach-consciousness-as-a-coherence-inducing-operator","title":{"rendered":"Joscha Bach \u2014 Consciousness as a coherence-inducing operator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qoHCQ1ozswA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A theory of consciousness should capture its phenomenology, characterize its ontological status and extent, explain its causal structure and genesis, and describe its function. Here, I advance the notion that consciousness is best understood as an operator, in the sense of a physically implemented transition function that is acting on a representational substrate and controls its temporal evolution, and as such has no identity as an object or thing, but (like software running on a digital computer) it can be characterized as a law. Starting from the observation that biological information processing in multicellular substrates is based on self organization, I explore the conjecture that the functionality of consciousness represents the simplest algorithm that is discoverable by such substrates, and can impose function approximation via increasing representational coherence. I describe some properties of this operator, both with the goal of recovering the phenomenology of consciousness, and to get closer to a specification that would allow recreating it in computational simulations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A theory of consciousness should capture its phenomenology, characterize its ontological status and extent, explain its causal structure and genesis, and describe its function. Here, I advance the notion that consciousness is best understood as an operator, in the sense of a physically implemented transition function that is acting on a representational substrate and controls [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1523,41,1496,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-computing","category-information-science","category-law","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}