As is well known, the Turing Test proposes the possibility of distinguishing the behavior of a machine from that of a human being through an experimental session. The Turing Test assesses whether a person asking questions to two different entities, can tell from their answers which of them is the human being and which is the machine. With the progress of Artificial Intelligence, the number of...
We here analyse the question of developing artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, taking the evolution of the human brain and its relation with consciousness as a reference model or as a benchmark. This kind of analysis reveals several structural and functional features of the human brain that appear to be key for reaching human-like complex conscious experience and that...
Goal-directed manipulation of internal representations is a key element of human flexible behaviour, while consciousness is commonly associated with higher-order cognition and human flexibility. Current perspectives have only partially linked these processes, thus preventing a clear understanding of how they jointly generate flexible cognition and behaviour. Moreover, these limitations prevent...
Previous research has examined resting electroencephalographic (EEG) data to explore brain activity related to meditation. However, previous research has mostly examined power in different frequency bands. The practical objective of this study was to comprehensively test whether other types of time-series analysis methods are better suited to characterize brain activity related to meditation....
Neural NetworksJanuary 2022Angela J Langdon, Matthew Botvinick, Hiroyuki Nakahara et al.
The intersection between neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) research has created synergistic effects in both fields. While neuroscientific discoveries have inspired the development of AI architectures, new ideas and algorithms from AI research have produced new ways to study brain mechanisms. A well-known example is the case of reinforcement learning (RL), which has stimulated...
The emotion regulation mechanism of mindfulness plays an important role in the stress reduction effect. Many researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience have attempted to elucidate this mechanism by documenting the cognitive processes that occur and the neural activities that characterize each process. However, previous findings have not revealed the mechanism...
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how we experience qualia or phenomenal experiences, such as seeing, hearing, and feeling, and knowing what they are. To solve this problem, a theory of consciousness needs to link brain to mind by modeling how emergent properties of several brain mechanisms interacting together embody detailed properties of individual conscious...
The state space of a conventional Hopfield network typically exhibits many different attractors of which only a small subset satisfies constraints between neurons in a globally optimal fashion. It has recently been demonstrated that combining Hebbian learning with occasional alterations of normal neural states avoids this problem by means of self-organized enlargement of the best basins of...
Efforts to create computational models of consciousness have accelerated over the last two decades, creating a field that has become known as artificial consciousness. There have been two main motivations for this controversial work: to develop a better scientific understanding of the nature of human/animal consciousness and to produce machines that genuinely exhibit conscious awareness. This...
Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, is a cognitive and neural theory of how the brain autonomously learns to categorize, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world. This article reviews classical and recent developments of ART, and provides a synthesis of concepts, principles, mechanisms, architectures, and the interdisciplinary data bases that they have helped to explain and...
Neural NetworksAugust 1, 2012Nagendra Marupaka, Laxmi R Iyer, Ali A Minai
Understanding cognition has been a central focus for psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers for thousands of years, but many of its most fundamental processes remain very poorly understood. Chief among these is the process of thought itself: the spontaneous emergence of specific ideas within the stream of consciousness. It is widely accepted that ideas, both familiar and novel, arise...
A model of conscious mechanisms called Axiomatic Consciousness Theory (ACT) is used to develop a neuroarchitectural model of visual phenomenology. The result is an extension of concepts in neural systems towards phenomenal intentionality: the lack of which is a common starting point for critiques of AI. Here the argument is developed at four interacting grain levels of description and the...
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...
In this paper we will argue that given certain conditions for the evolution of biological controllers, they will necessarily evolve in the direction of incorporating consciousness capabilities. We will also see what are the necessary mechanics for the provision of these capabilities and extrapolate this vision to the world of artificial systems.
There is presently an ongoing debate about the relation between attention and consciousness. Thus debate is being fuelled by results from experimental paradigms which probe various forms of the interaction between attention and consciousness, such as the attentional blink, object-substitution masking and change blindness. We present here simulations of these three paradigms which can all be...
There has been much discussion on what a scientific theory of consciousness would look like, and even whether such a theory is possible. Some common misunderstandings of the nature of theories (e.g., in the physical sciences) have confused the discussion of theories concerning consciousness. Theories in the physical sciences establish hierarchies of descriptions that relate high-level...
A full understanding of consciousness requires that we identify the brain processes from which conscious experiences emerge. What are these processes, and what is their utility in supporting successful adaptive behaviors? Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) predicted a functional link between processes of Consciousness, Learning, Expectation, Attention, Resonance and Synchrony (CLEARS), including...
We present a review of the CODAM neural network control model of consciousness and develop it to arrive at a functional account of consciousness. The main feature is as a speed-up and error-correcting mechanism known, in engineering control theory, to be efficient in improving the speed of response and accuracy of any control system. We use the CODAM model to generate a set of predictions as to...
When one is conscious of something, one is also conscious that one is conscious. Higher-Order Thought Theory [Rosenthal, D. (1997). A theory of consciousness. In N. Block, O. Flanagan, & G. Güzeldere (Eds.), The nature of consciousness: Philosophical debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] takes it that it is in virtue of the fact that one is conscious of being conscious, that one is conscious....
While neural net models have been developed to a high degree of sophistication, they have some drawbacks at a more integrative, "architectural" level of analysis. We describe a "hybrid" cognitive architecture that is implementable in neuronal nets, and which has uniform brainlike features, including activation-passing and highly distributed "codelets," implementable as small-scale neural nets....
What is the relation between visual attention and visual awareness? It is difficult to imagine being aware of something without attending to it, and by some, visual consciousness is simply equated to what is in the focus of attention. However, findings from psychological as well as from neurophysiological experiments argue strongly against equating attention and visual consciousness. From these...
Pattern completion in a neural network model of the thalamus and a biologically plausible model of synaptic plasticity are the key concepts used in this paper for analyzing some cognitive disorders that involve hallucinations of several kinds: visual hallucinations in the Charles Bonnet syndrome and psychedelic drugs consumption, somatic hallucination in phantom limbs, cognitive hallucinations...
Considerable progress is being made in interdisciplinary efforts to develop a general theory of the neural correlates of consciousness. Developments of Baars' Global Workspace theory over the past decade are examples of this progress. Integrating experimental data and models from cognitive psychology, AI and neuroscience, we present a neurocognitive model in which consciousness is defined as a...
Recent interest in consciousness and the mind-brain problem has been fueled by technological advances in brain imaging and computer modeling in artificial intelligence: can machines be conscious? The machine metaphor originated in Cartesian "reflections" and culminated in 19th century reflexology modeled on Newtonian optics. It replaced the Aquinian view of mind, which was focused on the...