Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2023
Rodrick Wallace
Consciousness in higher animals, by virtue of its 100 ms time constant, is a necessarily greatly simplified and stripped-down version of more complex multiple tunable workspace cognition/ regulation dyads like wound healing, immune function, gene expression, institutional function and the like. These more complex dynamic entities emerged through evolutionary exaptation of the inevitable...
PsyArXiv
January 23, 2023
Rodrick Wallace
preprint
Real-world cognitive structures -- embodied biological, machine or composite entities -- are inherently unstable by virtue of the 'topological information' imposed upon them by external circumstance, adversarial intent, and other persistent 'selection pressures'. Consequently, under the Data Rate Theorem, they must be constantly controlled by embedding regulators. For example, blood pressure...
Journal of Theoretical Biology
November 21, 2016
Rodrick Wallace
Evolutionary process has been selected for inherently unstable systems in higher animals that can react swiftly to changing patterns of threat or opportunity, for example blood pressure, the immune response, and gene expression. However, these require continual strict regulation: uncontrolled blood pressure is fatal, immune cells can attack 'self' tissues, and improper gene expression triggers...
Nature Precedings
July 18, 2011
Rodrick Wallace
Abstract Once cognition is recognized as having a 'dual' information source, the information theory chain rule implies that isolating coresident information sources from crosstalk requires more metabolic free energy than permitting correlation. This provides conditions for an evolutionary exaptation leading to the rapid, shifting global neural broadcasts of consciousness. The argument is quite...
Nature Precedings
January 5, 2011
Rodrick Wallace
Abstract The Stanley Miller experiment suggests that amino acid-based life is ubiquitous in our universe, although its varieties are not likely to have followed the particular, highly contingent and path-dependent, evolutionary trajectory found on Earth. Are many alien organisms likely to be conscious in ways that we would recognize? Almost certainly. Will some develop high order technology?...
Nature Precedings
November 18, 2010
Rodrick Wallace
Abstract The Stanley Miller experiment suggests that amino acid-based life is ubiquitous in our universe, although its varieties are not likely to have followed the particular, highly contingent and path-dependent, trajectory found on Earth. Are many of these life forms likely to be conscious in ways that we would recognize? Almost certainly. Will many conscious entities develop high order...
Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling
December 1, 2005
Rodrick Wallace
AbstractBackgroundRecent developments in Global Workspace theory suggest that human consciousness can suffer interpenetrating dysfunctions of mutual and reciprocal interaction with embedding environments which will have early onset and often insidious staged developmental progression, possibly according to a cancer model, in which a set of long-evolved control strategies progressively...
Rodrick Wallace
Evolutionary process has selected for inherently unstable physiological systems in higher animals that can react swiftly to patterns of threat or affordance, for example blood pressure and the immune response. However, these require ongoing strict regulation: unregulated blood pressure is fatal, and immune cells can attack 'self' tissues. Consciousness, perhaps the most sophisticated rapid...
Rodrick Wallace
We demonstrate that all enterprises of embodied cognition, ranging from the ‘simply’ cognitive to the conscious, and from the individual to the mechanical, institutional, and composite, are susceptible to induced patterns of hallucination, panic, and exhaustion on challenging landscapes of fog, friction, and deadly adversarial intent. We further argue, in consonance with C.S. Gray, that dreams...
Rodrick Wallace
preprint
Abstract: The Data Rate Theorem carries deep implications for theories of embodied cognition, extensions providing a spectrum of necessary conditions dynamic statistical models useful in empirical studies. A large deviations argument, however, implies that the regulation and stabilization of such systems is itself an interpenetrating phenomenon necessarily convoluted with embodied cognition....