From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2005 - 10:30:21 MST
Philip,
You should read this edited volume
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262133709
it's a damn good one, and I think it will enrich your perspective on these
topics. Not that any of the authors have solved all the problems of
consciousness, but a lot of them are very smart and have thought about the
topic very hard and come up interesting ideas.
Among other things, some papers there describe research proving that FOCUSED
ATTENTION can occur in humans WITHOUT consciousness.
So, while there's a close relationship between consciousness and attention,
it's not an identity by any means...
-- Ben
A abstract and TOC of the book are as follows:
****
Neural Correlates of Consciousness
Thomas Metzinger
This book brings together an international group of neuroscientists
and philosophers who are investigating how the content of subjective
experience is correlated with events in the brain. The fundamental
methodological problem in consciousness research is the subjectivity of the
target phenomenon--the fact that conscious experience, under standard
conditions, is always tied to an individual, first-person perspective. The
core empirical question is whether and how physical states of the human
nervous system can be mapped onto the content of conscious experience. The
search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has become a highly
active field of investigation in recent years. Methods such as single-cell
recording in monkeys and brain imaging and electrophysiology in humans,
applied to such phenomena as blindsight, implicit/explicit cognition, and
binocular rivalry, have generated a wealth of data. The same period has seen
the development of a number of theories about NCC location. This volume
brings together the leading experimentalists and theoreticians in the field.
Topics include foundational and evolutionary issues, global integration,
vision, consciousness and the NMDA receptor complex, neuroimaging, implicit
processes, intentionality and phenomenal volition, schizophrenia, social
cognition, and the phenomenal self.
Table of Contents
Preface
1 Introduction: Consciousness Research at the End of the
Twentieth Century
I Foundational Issues and Conceptual Problems
2 What Is a Neural Correlate of Consciousness?
by David J. Chalmers
3 The Perennial Problem of the Reductive Explainability
of Phenomenal Consciousness: C. D. Broad on the Explanatory Gap
by Ansgar Beckermann
4 Prospects for a Scientific Research Program on
Consciousness
by Antti Revonsuo
5 The Evolution and Ontogeny of Consciousness
by Gerhard Roth
II Candidates for the NCC I: Representational Dynamics
6 The Unconscious Homunculus
by Francis Crick and Christof Koch
7 A Neurobiology for Consciousness
by Antonio R. Damasio
8 Phenomenal Awareness and Consciousness from a
Neurobiological Perspective
by Wolf Singer
9 Reentry and the Dynamic Core: Neural Correlates of
Conscious Experience
by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi
III Candidates for the NCC II: Vision
10 Visual Perception Without Awareness: Priming
Responses by Color
by Thomas Schmidt
11 Face Representation Without Conscious Processing
by Beena Khurana
12 Space in the Brain: Different Neural Substrates for
Allocentric and Egocentric Frames of Reference
by Melvyn A. Goodale and Kelly J. Murphy
13 Conscious Registration of Continuous and Discrete
Visual Events
by Romi Nijhawan and Beena Khurana
14 Imaging Conscious Vision
by Dominic ffytche
15 Binocular Rivalry and Human Visual Awareness
by Erik D. Lumer
IV Candidates for the NCC III: Consciousness,
Anesthesia, and the NMDA Receptor Complex
16 NMDA Receptor-Mediated Computational Processes and
Phenomenal Consciousness
by Hans Flohr
17 How to Understand the N in NCC
by Valerie Gray Hardcastle
18 The Role of NMDA Receptors in Consciousness: What We
Learn from Anesthetic Mechanisms?
by Nicholas P. Franks and William R. Lieb
19 NMDA Receptor-Mediated Consciousness: A Theoretical
Framework for Understanding the Effects of Anesthesia on Cognition?
by Jackie Andrade
V Toward the Neural Correlates of Selfhood, Agency, and
Social Cognition
20 The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A
Representationist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective
by Thomas Metzinger
21 Awareness of Agency: Three Levels of Analysis
by Joelle Proust
22 The Acting Subject: Toward the Neural Basis of Social
Cognition
by Vittorio Gallese
Contributors
Index
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-agi@v2.listbox.com [mailto:owner-agi@v2.listbox.com]On Behalf
Of Philip Sutton
Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2005 11:30 AM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Subject: RE: [agi] What are qualia...
Hi Ben,
I just read Chalmers article and yours.
You concluded your article with:
> In artificial intelligence terms, the present theory suggests that if
> an AI program is constructed so that its dynamics give rise to a
> constant stream of patterns that are novel and significant (measured
> relative to the system itself), then this program will report
> experiences of awareness and consciousness somewhat similar to those
> that humans report.
This is a useful statement because it testable at some stage when AI
exists that can hold complex conversations.
By the way, would it be true that a "novel and significant" pattern is one
that by definition trigger the AI's attention system? If so then that is a
commmon point in both our speculations.
I think I've nearly exhausted the value of my speculations for the moment.
My intuition is that qualia are going to be different in intelligences that
do *not* have long evolutionary histories of being social, compared to those
that do have such histories (a species could be currently non-social, but if
it has evolved from antecendents that have gone through a social phase then
my guess is that it would experieice qualia more like social species ie. the
capacity for experiencing qualia is like to be retained to some degree).
My guess is that there will be structured processes discovered in brains
that account for the subjective experience of qualia - and that qualia will
not be experienced without some appropriate system for qualia generation ie.
pattern recognition by an AI will not be enough by itself to give rise to
the experience of qualia. But this intuition is so speculative and so
poorly based on my part that it probably doesn't warrant comment from
others! :) So I might leave it there and just wait to see what people come
up with in the future.
Cheers, Philip
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