consciousness

A new study looks at "consciousness steering" in AI, but could this technology actually achieve this level of self-awareness in the first place?

This paper proposes a layered integrative model of consciousness that seeks to reconcile three widely discussed perspectives: (1) the phenomenal (first-person) reality of subjective experience; (2) the functional account that identifies consciousness with cognitive mechanisms such as information integration, self-modeling, and adaptive optimization; and (3) the social-representational perspective…

Most scientists think that consciousness is created by the brain. After all, most assume consciousness vanishes if the brain is destroyed. But what if this consensus view is radically mistaken? Join distinguished Cambridge scientist Rupert Sheldrake as he argues that the mind extends beyond the brain and explores the radical implications of this account.

“transducer” concept could explain consciousness, dreams, genius, and around 90 mysterious phenomena.

The following story originally appeared on the website for the William & Mary College of Arts & Sciences. – Ed. For centuries, humans have contemplated the meaning of life to better understand themselves and the world around them. The religious studies department is reshaping that ancient tradition for modern contexts by introducing a new contemplative studies major that invites students to look …

The experiencing subject plays a central role in ordinary conceptions of consciousness, yet it has received comparatively little attention as an explicit target of scientific theorizing. This is surprising because subjectivity, persistence across changing experiences, and the apparent individuality of conscious systems all seem closely related to the notion of an experiencing subject. The present…

Could a machine ever feel pain, enjoy music or have its own private experience of the world? As artificial intelligence becomes better at conversation, reasoning and problem-solving, questions once limited to science fiction are attracting serious scientific attention. The challenge begins with a basic mystery: Scientists still do not know exactly why humans are conscious. […] The post Could a Ma…

This “transducer” concept could explain consciousness, dreams, genius, and around 90 mysterious phenomena.

Consciousness is often treated as an evolutionary anomaly, a costly capacity with unclear adaptive origins. Here, cognition and consciousness are distinguished as separate evolutionary lineages, with consciousness arising when an organism must coordinate otherwise distinct regulatory processes to resolve competing demands affecting its own viability. Its functional precursors predate nervous syst…

Brief disruptions in the brain’s normal firing patterns can create powerful feelings of being part of “something greater.”

_Ssrn_. 2026An acceptable information-processing theory of consciousness should be able to identify the adaptive advantages that drove the emergence of consciousness during the evolution of life. It should also predict the specific dynamical architecture of information processing that would need to be instantiated in AI to produce consciousness and the superior adaptation it enables. Whether such…

The hard problem of consciousness asks why the performance of cognitive functions is accompanied by subjective experience. This article argues that the question can be reformulated as a computable dynamical problem: subjectivity generation requires a cost function on path space. I present the unified rate functional Icx—the Freidlin–Wentzell rate function of a physical path measure—as the central…

A new theory, published in The Journal of Neuroscience by three scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, offers an explanation of how the brain produces cognition and consciousness: It uses traveling waves of rhythmic neural activity to coordinate nimble neural networks with analog computations.

This is a secular, first-person account of a contemplative practice developed over more than thirty years of Zen meditation, written by a practitioner rather than a scholar. It draws together Charlotte Joko Beck's teaching on the core negative belief, Iain McGilchrist's account of hemispheric asymmetry, Douglas Hofstadter's notion of the strange loop, and neuroscientific research on the Default M…

If consciousness is a by-product of our brains’ nonconscious processes, where does that leave us?

There is a deeper side to the brain which weaves your memories, goals, beliefs and emotions into a continuous sense of self.