A report on Consciousness and Mind

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century

René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism.
Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.

Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured).

Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.

Square version of the neon spread illusion

Sometimes, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind.

- Consciousness

One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states.

- Mind

13 related topics with Alpha

A phrenological mapping of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain although it is now widely discredited.

Philosophy of mind

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René Descartes' illustration of mind/body dualism.

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)

Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.

The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token–token correspondences can fall outside of the type–type correspondences. The result is token identity.

John Searle—one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)

Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body.

Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Mind–body dualism

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Four varieties of dualist causal interaction. The arrows indicate the direction of causations. Mental and physical states are shown in red and blue, respectively.

Another one of Descartes' illustrations. The fire displaces the skin, which pulls a tiny thread, which opens a pore in the ventricle (F) allowing the "animal spirit" to flow through a hollow tube, which inflates the muscle of the leg, causing the foot to withdraw.

Cartesian dualism compared to three forms of monism.

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.

Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence.

The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin

Thought

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In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation.

Metaphysics is, among other things, interested in the relation between mind and matter.

Mental state

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A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person.

Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states.

Property dualism

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Composed of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.

Biological Naturalism states that consciousness is a higher level function of the human brain's physical capabilities.

Huxley explained mental properties as like the steam on a locomotive

Substance dualism, on the other hand, is the view that there exist in the universe two fundamentally different kinds of substance: physical (matter) and non-physical (mind or consciousness), and subsequently also two kinds of properties which inhere in those respective substances.

Mental event

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A mental event is any event that happens within the mind of a conscious individual.

The circled dot was used by the Pythagoreans and later Greeks to represent the first metaphysical being, the Monad or The Absolute

Monism

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Distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonism everything is derived from The One. In this view only the One is ontologically basic or prior to everything else.

A diagram with neutral monism compared to Cartesian dualism, physicalism and idealism.

The mind–body problem in philosophy examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain.

Artificial intelligence

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Intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans.

An ontology represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.

A parse tree represents the syntactic structure of a sentence according to some formal grammar.

Feature detection (pictured: edge detection) helps AI compose informative abstract structures out of raw data.

Kismet, a robot with rudimentary social skills

A particle swarm seeking the global minimum

Expectation-maximization clustering of Old Faithful eruption data starts from a random guess but then successfully converges on an accurate clustering of the two physically distinct modes of eruption.

A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.

Representing images on multiple layers of abstraction in deep learning

For this project the AI had to learn the typical patterns in the colors and brushstrokes of Renaissance painter Raphael. The portrait shows the face of the actress Ornella Muti, "painted" by AI in the style of Raphael.

AI Patent families for functional application categories and sub categories. Computer vision represents 49 percent of patent families related to a functional application in 2016.

The word "robot" itself was coined by Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R., the title standing for "Rossum's Universal Robots"

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving".

The only thing visible is the behavior of the machine, so it does not matter if the machine is conscious, or has a mind, or whether the intelligence is merely a "simulation" and not "the real thing".

A cat in an affectionate frame of mind, by T. W. Wood (1872).

Sentience

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Capacity to experience feelings and sensations.

In science fiction, the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with "sapience", "self-awareness", or "consciousness".

According to Antonio Damasio, sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something).

Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Psychology

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One of the dogs used in Pavlov's experiment with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia

False-color representations of cerebral fiber pathways affected, per Van Horn et al.

Skinner's teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed instruction

The Müller–Lyer illusion. Psychologists make inferences about mental processes from shared phenomena such as optical illusions.

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 posited that humans have a hierarchy of needs, and it makes sense to fulfill the basic needs first (food, water etc.) before higher-order needs can be met.

Developmental psychologists would engage a child with a book and then make observations based on how the child interacts with the object.

An example of an item from a cognitive abilities test used in educational psychology.

Flowchart of four phases (enrollment, intervention allocation, follow-up, and data analysis) of a parallel randomized trial of two groups, modified from the CONSORT 2010 Statement

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level etc.

Artificial neural network with two layers, an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.

A rat undergoing a Morris water navigation test used in behavioral neuroscience to study the role of the hippocampus in spatial learning and memory.

Phineas P. Gage survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and is remembered for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior.

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior.

Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts.