8 papers in the library · 1,515 citations · publishing 2005-2026
Animal Sentience August 3, 2026 Murray Shanahan
This commentary has two aims: first to clarify the behavioural grounds for the ascription of consciousness to non-human animals (including insects), and second to show how Klein & Barron’s views can be reconciled with the core claims of global workspace theory.
arXiv Preprint Archive March 20, 2025 Murray Shanahan
Is it possible to articulate a conception of consciousness that is compatible with the exotic characteristics of contemporary, disembodied AI systems, and that can stand up to philosophical scrutiny? How would subjective time and selfhood show up for an entity that conformed to such a conception? Trying to answer these questions, even metaphorically, stretches the language of consciousness to...
arXiv Preprint Archive April 22, 2015 Murray Shanahan
This paper critically assesses the anti-functionalist stance on consciousness adopted by certain advocates of integrated information theory (IIT), a corollary of which is that human-level artificial intelligence implemented on conventional computing hardware is necessarily not conscious. The critique draws on variations of a well-known gradual neuronal replacement thought experiment, as well as...
Journal of Neuroscience January 8, 2014 Peter J. Hellyer, Murray Shanahan, Gregory Scott et al. 225 citations
Understanding how dynamic changes in brain activity control behavior is a major challenge of cognitive neuroscience. Here, we consider the brain as a complex dynamic system and define two measures of brain dynamics: the synchrony of brain activity, measured by the spatial coherence of the BOLD signal across regions of the brain; and metastability, which we define as the extent to which...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014 Robin Carhart-Harris, Robert Leech, Peter J. Hellyer et al. 1,289 citations
Entropy is a dimensionless quantity that is used for measuring uncertainty about the state of a system but it can also imply physical qualities, where high entropy is synonymous with high disorder. Entropy is applied here in the context of states of consciousness and their associated neurodynamics, with a particular focus on the psychedelic state. The psychedelic state is considered an exemplar...
Oxford University Press eBooks June 24, 2010 Murray Shanahan 1 citation
The Global Workspace Theory of Bernard Baars proposes that an individual's cognitive architecture hosts both the conscious and the unconscious but the conscious thoughts are generally given more acknowledgment. Nevertheless, the processes in the cognitive architecture are transmitted through a series of episodes of broadcasts wherein the information contained in the global workspace are...
Consciousness and Cognition June 1, 2006 Murray Shanahan
This paper proposes a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates approximations to the concepts of consciousness, imagination, and emotion. To emulate the empirically established cognitive efficacy of conscious as opposed to non-conscious information processing in the mammalian brain, the architecture adopts a model of information flow from global workspace theory. Cognitive...
Cognition December 1, 2005 Murray Shanahan, Bernard J. Baars
The subject of this article is the frame problem, as conceived by certain cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, notably Fodor for whom it stands as a fundamental obstacle to progress in cognitive science. The challenge is to explain the capacity of so-called informationally unencapsulated cognitive processes to deal effectively with information from potentially any cognitive domain...