A report on Consciousness

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician
John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century
Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.
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).
John Searle in December 2005
The Necker cube, an ambiguous image
A Buddhist monk meditating
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

Sentience or awareness of internal and external existence.

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

98 related topics with Alpha

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Quantum mind

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The quantum mind or quantum consciousness is a group of hypotheses proposing that classical mechanics cannot explain consciousness.

Silver didrachma from Crete depicting Talos, an ancient mythical automaton with artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

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

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

Silver didrachma from Crete depicting Talos, an ancient mythical automaton with artificial intelligence
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 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".

Decorticate posturing, indicating a lesion at the red nucleus or above. This positioning is stereotypical for upper brain stem, or cortical damage. The other variant is decerebrate posturing, not seen in this picture.

Coma

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Deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions.

Deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions.

Decorticate posturing, indicating a lesion at the red nucleus or above. This positioning is stereotypical for upper brain stem, or cortical damage. The other variant is decerebrate posturing, not seen in this picture.

Wakefulness describes the quantitative degree of consciousness, whereas awareness relates to the qualitative aspects of the functions mediated by the cortex, including cognitive abilities such as attention, sensory perception, explicit memory, language, the execution of tasks, temporal and spatial orientation and reality judgment.

Artificial consciousness

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Field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics.

Field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics.

Neuroscience hypothesizes that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain, called the neural correlates of consciousness or NCC, though there are challenges to that perspective.

Ned Block

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Ned Joel Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science.

Julian Jaynes

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American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, "...the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. ... Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began."

The insula of the right side, exposed by removing the opercula.

Insular cortex

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Portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus (the fissure separating the temporal lobe from the parietal and frontal lobes) within each hemisphere of the mammalian brain.

Portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus (the fissure separating the temporal lobe from the parietal and frontal lobes) within each hemisphere of the mammalian brain.

The insula of the right side, exposed by removing the opercula.
The insula of the right side, exposed by removing the opercula.
The insula of the left side, exposed by removing the opercula.
Coronal section through anterior cornua of lateral ventricles.
Horizontal section of left cerebral hemisphere.
3D view of the insular cortex in an average human brain
thumb|Insular cortex highlighted in green on coronal T1 MRI images
thumb|Insular cortex highlighted in green on sagittal T1 MRI images
thumb|Insular cortex highlighted in green on transversal T1 MRI images

The insulae are believed to be involved in consciousness and play a role in diverse functions usually linked to emotion or the regulation of the body's homeostasis.

Detail of Plato in The School of Athens, by Raphael

Idealism

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Indistinguishable and inseparable from human perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas.

Indistinguishable and inseparable from human perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas.

Detail of Plato in The School of Athens, by Raphael
The sage Yajnavalkya (possibly 8th century BCE) is one of the earliest exponents of idealism, and is a major figure in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
Statue of Vasubandhu (jp. Seshin), Kōfuku-ji, Nara, Japan.
The 20th-century British scientist Sir James Jeans wrote that "the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine"

Hindu idealism often takes the form of monism or non-dualism, espousing the view that a unitary consciousness is the essence or meaning of the phenomenal reality and plurality.

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Neutral monism

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Umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind.

Umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind.

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Panpsychism is a class of theories that believe consciousness is ubiquitous.

Intentionality

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Power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs.

Power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs.

Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness that are thus "psychical" or "mental" phenomena, by which they may be set apart from "physical" or "natural" phenomena.