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Neural Correlates of Consciousness - Science topic
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If physics adjusted for the law of identity, could we exactly quantify the afterlife? How?
Maybe so:
1)On Physics:
Presentation Critical Rationalist Physics
2)Deductive reasoning:
Will it be possible to build an artificial consciousness similar to human consciousness in digitized structures of artificial intelligence if in specific structures of artificial intelligence will digitally reproduce the artificial structures of neurons and the entire central nervous system of humans?
If artificial intelligence that mapped human neurons was built, then it would be a very advanced artificial intelligence. If artificial intelligence was built in such a way that all human neurons would be reconstructed in digital technology, it would mean the possibility of building cybernetic structures capable of collecting and processing data in a much larger database capacity than at present. However, if it would only be the reproduction of simple neural structures and their reproduction to the number of neurons contained in the human organism, then only or mainly quantitative and not necessarily qualitative factors that characterize the collection and processing of data in the human brain would be achieved. Without achieving all of the qualitative variables typical of the human nervous system in a cybernetic counterpart, it might be doubtful to create in this cybernetic structure an artificial nervous system of cybernetic consciousness which is the equivalent of human consciousness.
Do you agree with me on the above matter?
In the context of the above issues, I am asking you the following question:
Will it be possible to build an artificial consciousness similar to human consciousness in digitized structures of artificial intelligence if in specific structures of artificial intelligence will digitally reproduce the artificial structures of neurons and the entire central nervous system of humans?
Please reply
I invite you to the discussion
Thank you very much
Best wishes

The knowledge claim about the possibility of Artificial Super-Intelligence in the future raised several questions for us. is it a metaphysical possibility or a philosophical jargon? Can artificial intelligence surpass human intelligence- can A.I machines (which are functionally and behaviourally identical to human agent ) builds independently without the intervention of human intelligence (the A.I machines not only can work but also think like human beings)? Can there be a singularity in the field of artificial intelligence in the future? The fastest development in the field of A.I. within two decades makes us think about future prospects of A.I and the possible threats to humanity in the future. There are several ethical issues are concerned which has to be addressed. If rationality is the criterion for the autonomy of the agency of an organism, as stated by Immanuel Kant, then can Artificial Intelligent machines qualify the criteria of rationality for the status of Autonomy which is applied to the human organism.
-Neural correlate of consciousness (abbreviated: ncc) is a system of neurons in the brain by which consciousness would be possible (i.e. according to neuroscientists and researchers of consciousness studies).
-However, near death studies and psi-researchers (for the last decade up to now) have arrived to a rather correct conclusion that consciousness is able to exsist without any ncc.
-The scientific conclusion of the near death studies and the psi-research is then: ncc is not the necessary condition for the exsistence of consciousness.
-There are then two contradictory research findings.
-What is your scientific research finding(s)? Thanks a lot! Marc.
I need a feedback on review o myu paper on EMF effects in nonthermal doses on living creatures which is based on storage capacity of DNA. Can reincarnation be explained by physical mechanisms and can DNa MEMORIZE THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUR ANCESTORS ?
are there three-qubit quantum circuits with uncertainty?
Some examples: Property Dualism (Chalmers); Biological naturalism (Searle); Monadology (Leibniz); Unified Conscious Field (Libet, Searle); Cartesian Dualism (Descartes); Monism; Phenomenal Consciousness (Chalmers, Husserl, Nagel, Searle); Higher-order Thoughts (Rosenthal); Higher-order Perception (Locke, Lycan)
For all the formidable progress made in numerous fields by cognitive neurosciences, we are still in the dark about very many aspects of attention. One thing that is now beyond doubt is the multiplicity of processes that underlie it, for attention is involved in numerous other fundamental cognitive processes — perception, motor action, memory — and any attempt to isolate it in order to study its constant features is bound to prove sterile. For over a century and a half attention was a crucial topic in neurophysiology and psychology. In the early days of scientific psychology it was viewed as an autonomous function that could be isolated from the rest of psychic activity. However, this idea soon came to be seen as inadequate. At the beginning of the 20th century researchers became convinced that attention underpinned a general energetic condition involving the whole of the personality. Within a few years the emergence of the Gestalt and Behaviourism paradigms caused these studies to be overshadowed, and it was not until the second half of last century that they regained their importance.
For a long time the debate was influenced by the hypothesis that attention constitutes a level of consciousness varying widely in extension and clarity and only functioning in relation to its variations: from sleep to wakefulness, from somnolent to crepuscular, from confusion to hyper-lucidity, from oneiric to oneiroid states, and so on. Subsequently other approaches of considerable theoretical importance linked attention to emotion, affectivity and psychic energy or social determinants. Yet what do we really know about attention, the sphere of our life which orients mental activity towards objects, actions and objectives, maintaining itself at a certain level of tension for variable periods of time? How and to what extent is attention related to consciousness? Why does only a minimal part of the information from the external world reach the brain even though the physical inputs strike our senses with the same intensity? And why is it that, although they enter our field of consciousness, most of these inputs do not surface in our awareness? It is well known that in the selection of stimuli, attention is strongly influenced by individual expectations. They ‘decide’ which objects and events appear in our awareness, and which are destined never to appear. The law of interest regulates a large part of the selection of the objects and topics on which our attention is focused.
For over a century, the sciences of mind have tried to throw light on the most obscure secrets of the brain. But the more maps are drawn, the more mechanisms that are discovered, the harder it becomes to arrive at an understanding. It becomes increasingly clearer that cerebral organization is much more complex and dynamic than was suspected until a few decades ago. Many researchers believe that what will help our understanding of social life will be the powerful development of technology or, more precisely, the face-off between man and computer (of incredible power) which will generate organisms capable of going beyond the simulation of cerebral functions; they will learn from their own inner states, interpret the data of reality, set their own objectives, and converse with humans; above all, they will make decisions on the basis of their own ‘value systems’. In a not-too-distant future, it is thought, these organisms will be able to acquire greater and greater autonomy, self-conservation, their own creativity, value hierarchies and, perhaps, even have an ethic based on ‘freedom’.
If we are to go far beyond the confines of what today is defined human, to the point of including entities which are the product of hybridization of biological organisms and articifical ones (humanoids, cyborgs and so on), we believe we should consider how we might get there. This is an extremely relevant question which relates to the set of those functions which make man the highest expression of evolution: above all, it concerns consciousness, that huge and complex variety of neurobiological, phenomenological and psychological events that, ever since the first stages of development, have prepared the ground for the emergence of the Self, which enables us to become aware, to lay down values and hierarchies of values, rules and decisions about everything ranging from freedom to necessity.
Orch-OR theory for consciousness asserts that the microtubules are the neural structures that support the quantum effects. Let's assume that it is true. Therefore, if they have to play a role in the brain, they need to effect the signal transmission in the brain. Is there any indication for such an effect?
Instead of gradually replacing biological neurons with silicon neurons as in Chalmers' Fading Qualia, I attempt to gradually replace dividable functions of biological neurons with silicon emulation.
The question is, at which manipulation stage does our brain lose consciousness (qualia)?
1) Replacement of axonal spike propagation with an external artificial mechanism that uses radio transmission (e.g. WiFi): Causality between presynaptic neuronal firings and postsynaptic PSPs is preserved, but now neurons are physically isolated.
2) Further replacement of postsynaptic PSP integration with an external artificial mechanism: Causality between presynaptic neuronal firings and postsynaptic somatic membrane potential is preserved, but now without sophisticated dendritic-somatic computation.
3) Further replacement of transformation from postsynaptic somatic membrane potential to postsynaptic firing (Hodgkin-Huxley Eq. mechanisms) with an external artificial mechanism that integrates presynaptic firings and activates postsynaptic neurons by current injection accordingly: Causality between presynaptic neuronal firings and postsynaptic neuronal firings is preserved, but now without an intact internal variable, the membrane potential.
4) Mere replay of spatio-temporal neuronal firing patterns by external current injection: Zero causal interactions among neurons.
What are the existing tests for machine consciousness that directly tests qualia generated in a device? I find many proposals, but they only seem to test functional aspects of consciousness related neural processing (e.g. binding, attentional mechanisms, broadcasting of information), but not consciousness itself.
I have a proposal of my own and would like to know how it compares with other existing ideas.
The basic idea is to connect the device to our brain and test if qualia is generated in our "device visual field". The actual key to my proposal is how we connect the device and how we set the criteria for passing the test, since modern neurosynthesis (e.g. artificial retina) readily leads to sensory experience.
My short answer is to connect the device to one of our cortical hemispheres by mimicking inter-hemispheric connectivity and let the device take over the whole visual hemifield. We may test various theories of consciousness by implementing candidate neural mechanisms onto it and test whether subjective experience is evoked in the device's visual hemifield.
If we experience qualia in the "device visual hemifield" with the full artificial hemisphere, but not when the device is replaced with a look-up table that preserves all brain-device interaction, we have to say that something special, say consciousness, has emerged in the full device. We may conclude that the experienced qualia is due to some visual processing that was omitted in the look-up table. This is because, in regard to the biological hemisphere, the neural states would remain identical between the two experimental conditions.
The above argument stems from my view that, in case of biological to biological interhemispheric interaction, two potentially independent streams of consciousness seated in the two cortical hemispheres are "interlinked" via "thin inter-hemispheric connectivity", without necessarily exchanging all Shannon information sufficient to construct our bilateral visual percept.
Interhemispheric connectivity is "thin" in the sense that low-mid level visual areas are only connected at the vertical meridian. We need to go up to TE, TEO to have full hemifield connectivity. Then again, at TE, TEO, the visual representation is abstract, and most probably not rich enough to support our conscious vision as in Jackendoff's "Intermediate Level Theory of Consciousness".
The first realistic step would be to test the idea with two biological hemispheres, where we may assume that both are "conscious". As in the last part of the linked video above, we may rewire inter-hemispheric connectivity on split brain animals to totally monitor and manipulate inter-hemispheric neural interaction. Investigating conditions which regains bilateral percept (e.g. capability of conducting bilateral matching tasks) would let us test existing ideas on conscious neural mechanisms.
(And how difficult would it have been for the researchers to resist the urge to zap their poor subject in and out of consciousness at will?)
I am looking for studies that investigate the neural mechanisms of inner speech. PubMed searches only seem to produce studies on hallucinations in schizophrenia. I wonder if there are studies on everyday inner speech, i.e. thought.
I have a thought experiment (video link: "Paradox of Subjective Bilateral Vision"16:00-28:00) that results in very strange situations if "high-level visual areas themselves are not sufficient for conscious vision, (or low/mid-level visual areas are necessary)", namely, that the neural mechanism of conscious vision, its verbal report and solving of perceptual visual tasks (e.g. bilateral symmetry detection) violates physics that we know of today. I would like to know if there is any experimental/theoretical evidence on this issue. Thanks in advance!
Thanks to the two contributors, the above question has developed into a discussion on how subjective vision gain simultaneous holistic access to spatially distributed neural codes. There have been claims that 'holistic access' should be considered as a serious constraint on the neural mechanism of subjective experience. In case of vision, the seamless and the unified nature of our bilateral percept can be thought as an indicator of our consciousness mechanism having holistic access to wide-spread neural representation.
Unlike many popular theories of consciousness, some scientists believe that holistic access should be solved by actual physical processes in the realm of established science. In other words, there should be some single 'entity' that has causal physical access with consequences, to all subjectively experienced information. Although, there are surprising small number of models on consciousness that actually implement such a mechanism.
I explain my "Chaotic Spatiotemporal Fluctuation" hypothesis in the linked video (40:00 - 50:00), where holistic access is implemented by deterministic chaos components in neural fluctuation. Here, I define holistic access as 'every local change in the distributed neural code evoking global system-level changes in neural fluctuation', which relies on the so-called 'butterfly effect' of deterministic chaos. For the sake of clarification, the link between 'holistic access' and 'subjective experience' goes beyond physics that we know of today.
I would very much appreciate comments on the first question too.
The visual system is perhaps the best understood visual system of mammalian brain. However, one question has always bothered me...
How can our perception of the visual world (e.g. flowers in a pot, a deck railing that is horizontal, trees in the distance) all appear to be solid and stationary while our gaze (and presumably our entire representation of the visual world in area 17 of visual cortex) is fluctuating wildly in response to eye and head movements? Wouldn't this require re-mapping of the visual world on the neocortex with every saccade and head movement?
Furthermore, how can we clearly discern movement of single objects within our visual environment (a flying bird in our peripheral vision) when the whole visual world is gyrating with every saccade and rotation of our head? Is this a simple problem that I somehow just didn't hear the answer to?
For some time now there has been controversy between the people who think that the cerebral cortex is important to consciousness and those that think it is sited in the brain stem. In this question I note that the arrangement of connection between the precuneus and the PAG would offer a compromise allowing PAG based influence to directly affect cortex influence. In which case both schools of thought are vindicated.
When ones is handling a sequence of equations, what about his semantic perpective? How he is really "aware" about those symbols (and so on)?
The Angular Gyrus Model of Consciousness places the experiential image in the Angular Gyrus, but perhaps this is premature. It is possible that the Angular Gyrus is too early in the integration process, and the point of intersection between the integration process, and the experiential image is later in the integration process, and therefore deeper into the temporal lobe. What is your opinion on this?
Negativity of ERP has been often related to up-state and (the concomitant) awareness (He & Raichle; Bachmann, 1994 book; VAN in Revonsuo et al., Uttal & Cook on sleep vs awake ERPs to auditory signals, etc). At the same time, from my years of long experience in the perception and NCC lab, I can tell that introspecting on what goes on after stimulus presentation and up to the report (this interval lasting from about 1 to about several seconds) does not cause the awareness of the stimulus to disappear abruptly, but continues for some time in a vague, "shadowy" form. Essentially, this is the basis for our reports in experiments. If negativity lasts after the first standard P1, N1, P300 components and coincides in time with this introspection, it could really be a correlate of conscious perceptual contents.
While there is still a lot of debate as to what consciousness is and where it is loacted (cf. dualism vs. monism) some claim that techniques inspired from the eastern world like meditation and sophrology lead to a widening of consciousness.
And indeed changes in brain activation have been observed in people while meditating. However, are these really correlates of a widening consciousness or rather a response to the relaxation induced by these techniques? Would this suggest that consciousness is located in the brain?
I write about the diagnosis of vegetative state and minimally conscious state.
In some hospitals, the diagnosis is mainly done on a radiological basis while in other places specialists mainly rely on evaluative scales.
I am interested in knowing if any "radiological criterion" exist on the basis that some remaining awareness/consciousness can be ruled out (or not excluded), as this is not clearly a simple matter of functional activation in the cortex.
Can anyone help me?