In this paper I show that computational neuroscience provides an important new approach to traditional problems in philosophy such as the relation between mental states and brain states (the mind-body or mind-brain problem), to determinism and free will, and helps one with the ‘hard’ problem, the phenomenal aspects of consciousness.One of the themes of the paper and of my book Neuroculture: on...
A unified theory of emotion and motivation is updated in which motivational states are states in which instrumental goal-directed actions are performed to obtain anticipated rewards or avoid punishers, and emotional states are states that are elicited when the (conditioned or unconditioned) instrumental reward or punisher is or is not received. This advances our understanding of emotion and...
Abstract A comparison is made between computations in the brain and computations performed in computers. This is intended to be helpful to those engineers, computer scientists, AI specialists et al interested in designing new computers that emulate aspects of brain function. In fact, the whole of this book is intended to be useful for this aim, by setting out what is computed by different brain...
The relation between mental states and brain states is important in computational neuroscience, and in psychiatry in which interventions with medication are made on brain states to alter mental states. The relation between the brain and the mind has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Here a neuroscience approach is proposed in which events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network...
A neuroscience-based approach has recently been proposed for the relation between the mind and the brain. The proposal is that events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network levels take place simultaneously to perform a computation that can be described at a high level as a mental state, with content about the world. It is argued that as the processes at the different levels of...
Problems are raised with the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness, for example about exactly how global the workspace needs to be for consciousness to suddenly be present. Problems are also raised with Carruthers's (2019) version that excludes conceptual (categorical or discrete) representations, and in which phenomenal consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, with instead a...
Consciousness, and especially phenomenal consciousness (why it should feel like something), is a ‘hard’ problem in philosophy. It is not clear that it is amenable to a solution using neuroscience, but neuroscience does have many relevant and potential contributions to understanding phenomenal consciousness. It is argued that one route to action is the goal-directed route, with the goals set by...
It is shown that the randomness of the firing times of neurons in decision-making attractor neuronal networks that is present before the decision cues are applied can cause statistical fluctuations that influence the decision that will be taken. In this rigorous sense, it is possible to partially predict decisions before they are made. This raises issues about free will and determinism. There...
AbstractComputational processes that are closely related to conscious processing and reasoning are described. Evidence is reviewed that there are two routes to action, the explicit, conscious, one involving reasoning, and an implicit, unconscious route for well-learned actions to obtain goals. Then a higher order syntactic thought (HOST) computational theory of consciousness is described. It is...
Noise caused by randomness in the spiking times of neurons in the brain has a number of advantages, including contributing to probabilistic decision-making. However, noise results in the brain operating effectively as a non-deterministic system, which has implications for free will. Noise also results in decisions being taken probabilistically between the reasoning system and the implicit...
We propose a top-down approach to the symptoms of schizophrenia based on a statistical dynamical framework. We show that a reduced depth in the basins of attraction of cortical attractor states destabilizes the activity at the network level due to the constant statistical fluctuations caused by the stochastic spiking of neurons. In integrate-and-fire network simulations, a decrease in the NMDA...
Simultaneous recordings from populations of neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex show that most of the information about which stimulus was shown is available in the number of spikes (or firing rate) of each neuron, and not from stimulus-dependent synchrony, so that it is unlikely that stimulus-dependent synchrony (or indeed oscillations) is an essential aspect of visual object...
The affective neuroscience of consciousness: higher-order syntactic thoughts, dual routes to emotion and action, and consciousness from Part II - The neuroscience of consciousness Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012 By Edmund T.
A combined neurophysiological and computational approach is reviewed that leads to a proposal for how neural networks in the temporal cortical visual areas of primates could function to produce invariant object representation and identification. A similar approach is then reviewed which leads to a theory of how the hippocampus could rapidly store memories, especially episodic memories including...