The perennial debate about the possible directionality of evolution, as indicated by the apparent increase in the complexity of living systems over time, has recently witnessed renewed arguments in favor of the growth of complexity being “entropic,” that is, consistent with the growth of entropy as it is construed in thermodynamics. Here, I offer a brief review of formal treatments of...
Contemporary neurodynamical frameworks, such as coordination dynamics and winnerless competition, posit that the brain approximates symbolic computation by transitioning between metastable attractive states. This article integrates these accounts with electrophysiological data suggesting that coherent, nested oscillations facilitate information representation and transmission in thalamocortical...
To the extent that the performance of embodied and situated cognitive agents is predicated on fore- thought, such agents must remember, and learn from, the past to predict the future. In complex, non-stationary environments, such learning is facilitated by an intrinsic motivation to seek novelty. A significant part of an agent’s identity is thus constituted by its remembered distilled...
A computational theory of consciousness should include a quantitative measure of consciousness, or MoC, that (i) would reveal to what extent a given system is conscious, (ii) would make it possible to compare not only different systems, but also the same system at different times, and (iii) would be graded, because so is consciousness. However, unless its design is properly constrained, such an...
Klein & Barron’s (2016) (K & B’s) case for insect consciousness is a welcome development in an area that, in all of the science and philosophy of mind, is probably the most anthropocentric. In this commentary, we seek to strengthen K & B’s side of the argument by appealing not just to putative neural mechanisms but also to computational theory that supports it (section 1). We also offer some...
The proponents of machine consciousness predicate the mental life of a machine, if any, exclusively on its formal, organizational structure, rather than on its physical composition. Given that matter is organized on a range of levels in time and space, this generic stance must be further constrained by a principled choice of levels on which the posited structure is supposed to reside. Indeed,...
A standing challenge for the science of mind is to account for the datum that every mind faces in the most immediate--that is, unmediated--fashion: its phenomenal experience. The complementary tasks of explaining what it means for a system to give rise to experience and what constitutes the content of experience (qualia) in computational terms are particularly challenging, given the multiple...
By what empirical means can a person determine whether he or she is presently awake or dreaming? Any conceivable test addressing this question, which is a special case of the classical metaphysical doubting of reality, must be statistical (for the same reason that empirical science is, as noted by Hume). Subjecting the experienced reality to any kind of statistical test (for instance, a test...
Abstract In Contrast to the kind of REFLEXIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS afforded to humans by looking into the mirror of language, there exists in all of us a more primeval awareness. To the extent that they maintain a model of the world that surrounds them, and themselves as being part of it, all sentient beings share this latter capacity. In the present chapter, I lay out a computational explanation...