Terrence C Stewart

Two theories of consciousness: Semantic pointer competition vs. information integration.

Consciousness and Cognition November 2014 Paul Thagard, Terrence C Stewart

Consciousness results from three mechanisms: representation by firing patterns in neural populations, binding of representations into more complex representations called semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers to capture the most important aspects of an organism's current state. We contrast the semantic pointer competition (SPC) theory of consciousness with the hypothesis...