The criteria for determining animal sentience proposed in the target article are sensible but they lack an explicit functional justification for the focus on pain. This commentary provides an abbreviated account of the most basic functional principles that underpin animal sentience and articulates some minimal criteria for determining its presence.
Creatures that display ‘hedonic place preference behaviour’ are thought by many scientists to experience feelings, on the assumption that their attraction to pleasure-producing substances which lack nutritional value (e.g. cocaine, morphine) cannot easily be attributed to unconscious instinctual behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how a simple artificial agent that instantiates attributes of...
This chapter addresses the difficult scientific and philosophical challenge of engineering and then verifying consciousness within artificial agents. Moving beyond traditional focuses on perception and cognition, the authors argue that ‘affect’ – the raw capacity for feeling – is the fundamental form of consciousness. By defining consciousness as a subjective state rooted in an extended form of...
The origin of consciousness constitutes one of the most enduring challenges in contemporary science, with implications for neuroscience, philosophy, medicine and ethics. Traditional accounts have emphasized the cerebral cortex as the seat of conscious awareness, largely due to its expansion and complexity in humans. However, converging evidence suggests that the foundations of consciousness lie...
Abstract There is a curious contradiction in Seth’s argument, or a degree of ambiguity which proves to be fatal. He endorses “biological naturalism,” but he says also that it is possible to engineer “real artificial consciousness.” Such an artificially consciousness system need not be carbon-based, he says, so long as it is embodied in a system that is artificially “alive.”
Traditionally, emotions in dreams have been assessed using subjective ratings by human raters (e.g., external raters or dreamers themselves). These methods have extensive support and utility in dream science, yet they have certain innate limitations due to the subjective nature of the rating methodologies. Attempting to circumvent several of these limitations, we aimed to develop a novel method...
This paper aims to assess whether the recently proposed "inner screen model" of consciousness that follows from the free-energy principle (FEP) can be regarded as a minimal unifying model (MUM) of consciousness, thereby providing a common foundational model for consciousness studies, and integrating approaches to consciousness based on the FEP. We first present the inner screen model, which...
Summary: Functional dissociations in the brain observed during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep have been associated with reduced information integration and impaired consciousness that accompany increasing sleep depth. Here, we explored the dynamical properties of large-scale functional brain networks derived from transient brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Spatial...
Dream reports collected after rapid eye movement sleep (REM) awakenings are, on average, longer, more vivid, bizarre, emotional and story-like compared to those collected after non-REM. However, a comparison of the word-to-word structural organization of dream reports is lacking, and traditional measures that distinguish REM and non-REM dreaming may be confounded by report length. This problem...
Background: Dreaming is a universal experience, yet there is considerable inter-individual variability in dream recall frequency (DRF). One dominant model, the ‘arousal-retrieval’ model, posits that intra-sleep wakefulness is required for dream traces to be encoded into long-term storage, essentially proposing that a better memory for dreams underlie increased DRF. A recent study utilizing...
CortexDecember 25, 2018Yvonne Blake, David Terburg, Ross Balchin et al.
Neuroimaging studies have repeatedly shown amygdala activity during sleep (REM and NREM). Consequently, various theorists propose central roles for the amygdala in dreaming - particularly in the generation of dream affects, which seem to play a major role in dream plots. However, a causal role for the amygdala in dream phenomena has never been demonstrated. The traditional first step in...
Sigmund Freud was one of the first to claim that most of our mental life operates unconsciously and that consciousness is merely a property of one part of the mind. Many cognitive scientists argue that consciousness is of very little importance in mental life and that the vast bulk of our mental operations are performed without consciousness. Consciousness thus consists of feelings projected...
April 24, 2018Mark Solms, Oliver Hugh Turnbull1 citation
This chapter examines the relationship between mind and brain in general. It suggests that the classical mind-body problem has been redefined by cognitive scientists as the problem of consciousness. The mind-body problem is a philosophical conundrum that dates back to classical antiquity, and probably beyond. David Chalmers—one of the philosophers participating in the interdisciplinary field of...
This chapter deals with methodological questions regarding how brain mechanisms of dreaming. Dreams are notoriously difficult to investigate scientifically. Any discussion of the brain mechanisms of dreaming cannot begin before the phenomenon of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep has been introduced, because REM sleep has become widely known as “dreaming sleep.” During such investigation of the...
A sequence of studies followed, in quick succession, in which different parts of the brain were systematically removed in order to isolate the precise structures that produced rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Neuroscientific research into the mechanism of REM sleep continued along these lines, using a wide variety of methods, and by 1975 a detailed picture of the anatomy and physiology of...
This chapter explains the hard problem of consciousness and neuropsychoanalytic approach. The fact of unconscious mental processes applies equally to perception and cognition. It is possible to see without awareness, blindsight, recognize without awareness, read without awareness, learn without awareness, remember without awareness, and make decisions without awareness. Subjective consciousness...
consensus was not won by the arguments that Sigmund Freud set out in The unconscious; it derived from a different research tradition. Where Freud cited clinical psychopathological evidence, neuropsychological theorists independently postulated unconscious mental processes on the basis of clinical neuropathological evidence. It is true that Freud himself gradually came to recognise the...
This article applies the free energy principle to the hard problem of consciousness. After clarifying some philosophical issues concerning functionalism, it identifies the elemental form of consciousness as affect and locates its physiological mechanism (an extended form of homeostasis) in the upper brainstem. This mechanism is then formalized in terms of free energy minimization (in...
As science continues to explore the mysteries of the unconscious, two critical questions remain. First, can unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings be willfully raised to the level of the conscious self?, and, if so, would the unveiling of unconscious mechanisms lead to genuine self-knowledge or empowerment? Second, can we methodically tap into the unconscious to gear ourselves along more...
Abstract: The purpose of learning is not to maintain records but to generate predictions. Successful predictions remain implicit; only prediction errors (“surprises”) attract consciousness. This is what Freud had in mind when he declared that “consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace.” The aim of reconsolidation, and of psychotherapy, is to improve predictions about how to meet our needs...
A neuropsychoanalytical approach to the hard problem of consciousness revolves around the distinction between the subject of consciousness and objects of consciousness. In contrast to the mainstream of cognitive science, neuropsychoanalysis prioritizes the subject. The subject of consciousness is the indispensable page upon which consciousness of objects is inscribed. This has implications for...
It is commonly believed that consciousness is a higher brain function. Here we consider the likelihood, based on abundant neuroevolutionary data that lower brain affective phenomenal experiences provide the “energy” for the developmental construction of higher forms of cognitive consciousness. This view is concordant with many of the theoretical formulations of Sigmund Freud. In this...
We believe that conscious mental phenomena (such as feelings) are not epiphenomenal to the workings of the brain. Feelings evolved for good biological reasons; they make specific, concrete contributions to brain functioning. Notwithstanding all the philosophical complexities, therefore, the non-conscious/conscious interactions that are the focus of this book are, in our view, causal...
A. Revonsuo (2000b) proposed an evolutionary theory of dreaming, stating it is a threat simulation mechanism that allowed early humans to rehearse threat perception and avoidance without biological cost. The present study aimed to establish the proportion of dreams containing physical threats to the dreamer, whether these represent realistic life-threatening events, and whether the dreamer...