My Blog

Author: tstadmin

  • Integrating information in the brain’s EM field: the cemi field theory of consciousness

    A key aspect of consciousness is that it represents bound or integrated information, prompting an increasing conviction that the physical substrate of consciousness must be capable of encoding integrated information in the brain. However, as Ralph Landauer insisted, ‘information is physical’ so integrated information must be physically integrated. I argue here that nearly all examples of so-called ‘integrated information’, including neuronal information processing and conventional computing, are only temporally integrated in the sense that outputs are correlated with multiple inputs: the information integration is implemented in time, rather than space, and thereby cannot correspond to physically integrated information. I point out that only energy fields are capable of integrating information in space. I describe the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field theory which has proposed that consciousness is physically integrated, and causally active, information encoded in the brain’s global electromagnetic (EM) field. I here extend the theory to argue that consciousness implements algorithms in space, rather than time, within the brain’s EM field. I describe how the cemi field theory accounts for most observed features of consciousness and describe recent experimental support for the theory. I also describe several untested predictions of the theory and discuss its implications for the design of artificial consciousness. The cemi field theory proposes a scientific dualism that is rooted in the difference between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit.

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  • An empirical investigation of hedonistic accounts of animal welfare

    “Many scientists studying animal welfare appear to hold a hedonistic concept of welfare -whereby welfare is ultimately reducible to an animal’s subjective experience. […] analysis showed welfare judgments depended on the objective features of the animal’s life more than they did on how the animal was feeling: a chimpanzee living a natural life with negative emotions was rated as having better welfare than a chimpanzee living an unnatural life with positive emotions. We also found that the supposedly more purely psychological concept of happiness was also influenced by normative judgments about the animal’s life. For chimpanzees with positive emotions, those living a more natural life were rated as happier than those living an unnatural life. Insofar as analyses of animal welfare are assumed to be reflective of folk intuitions, these findings raise questions about a strict hedonistic account of animal welfare. More generally, this research demonstrates the potential utility of using empirical methods to address conceptual problems in animal welfare and ethics.”

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0193864

  • The Challenge of Determining Whether an A.I. Is Sentient, by Carissa Véliz

    “…sentience may go unnoticed for years, as was the case with Martin Pistorious [1] … Because brain death can be misdiagnosed [2], and because we have little understanding of the necessary and sufficient causes for consciousness and therefore cannot be certain of when someone might be in pain, some experts have called for the use of anesthesia [3] for organ donation procedures.”

    Read more:

    https://slate.com/technology/2016/04/the-challenge-of-determining-whether-an-a-i-is-sentient.html

    [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_pistorius_how_my_mind_came_back_to_life_and_no_one_knew?language=en

    [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/the-undead-by-dick-teresi.html?_r=0

    [3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2044.2000.055002105.x

     

  • The world as a neural network

    We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: “trainable” variables (e.g. bias vector or weight matrix) and “hidden” variables (e.g. state vector of neurons).

    Source

  • Kolmogorov theory of consciousness. An algorithmic model of consciousness

    Characterizing consciousness is a profound scientific problem with pressing clinical and practical implications. Examples include disorders of consciousness, locked-in syndrome, conscious state in utero, in sleep and other states of consciousness, in non-human animals, and perhaps soon in exobiology [astrobiology] or in machines. Here, we address the phenomenon of structured experience from an information-theoretic perspective.

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    We start from the subjective view (“my brain and my conscious experience”):

    1 “There is information and I am conscious.”

    2 “Reality, as it relates to experience and phenomenal structure, is a model my brain has built and continues to develop based on input–output information.”

    Source:

    https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix019/4470874

  • An organism able to learn and move with no brain, no mouth, no stomach, no eyes and 720 sexes

    A Paris zoo is showcasing a mysterious creature dubbed the “blob,” a yellowish collection of unicellular organisms called a slime mold that looks like a fungus, but acts like an animal.

    This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on public display on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet can detect food and digest it.

    The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.

    “The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries,” said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.

    “It surprises us, because it has no brain but is able to learn (…) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David said.

    The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.

    “We know for sure it is not a plant but we don’t really [know] if it’s an animal or a fungus,” said David.

    “It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom … it has the behaviour of an animal, it is able to learn.”

    Source:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/paris-zoo-blob-1.5325747

     

  • The search for invertebrate consciousness

    There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory‐heavy, theory‐neutral and theory‐light. Theory‐heavy and theory‐neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory‐light approach. At the core of the theory‐light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness‐linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking.

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  • Conversations about the badness of involuntary suffering

    I have the intuition that voluntary suffering might not be bad. This is primarily due to personal experience: I often feel sad (sympathy) when I encounter sad stories or sad situations, but I don’t have the intuition that this is bad for me, because I don’t feel like I ought to look away or stop feeling sad in response to these and I often feel like thinking/learning/reading more about these situations even if I feel more sadness because of it (and I usually do). This happens to me with both real and fictional situations (I was a fan of tragedies for a while). Furthermore, sometimes in the past, when I’ve been depressed about my own life, I didn’t want to be happy and even preferred to be miserable.

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    It’s suffering that’s bad, intrinsically (though suffering can be instrumentally good)

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    I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, and I think that even voluntary suffering is be intrinsically bad, as long as it’s still suffering at that point.

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    Buddhism would say that if you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you don’t suffer from it.

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    My intuition is that suffering is bad, but sometimes (all things considered) I prefer to suffer in a particular instance (e.g. in service of some other value). In such cases it would be better for my welfare if I did not suffer, but I still prefer to.

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    I think we don’t quite have the words to distinguish between all these things in English, but in my mind there’s something like

    • pain – the experience of negative valence
    • suffering – the experience of pain (i.e. the experience of the experience of negative valence)
    • expected suffering – the experience of pain that was expected, so you only suffer for the pain itself
    • unexpected suffering – the experience of pain that was not expected, so you suffer both the pain itself and the pain of suffering itself from it not being expected and thus having negative valence

    Of them all, unexpected suffering is the worst because it involves both pain and meta-pain.

    …

    I noticed that reading only “positive” and “joyous” stories eventually feel empty. The answer seem that sad elements in a story bring more depth than the fun/joyous ones. In that sense, sadness in stories act as a signal of deepness, but also a way to access some deeper part of our emotions and internal life.

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  • Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism

    The necessary features for consciousness in prominent physical theories of consciousness that are actually described in terms of physical processes do not exclude panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, including in things which aren’t typically considered alive. I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it, and those other theories could still be useful as approximations to judge degrees of consciousness. Overall, I’m skeptical that further progress in theories of consciousness will give us plausible descriptions of physical processes necessary for consciousness that don’t arbitrarily exclude panpsychism, whether or not panpsychism is true.

    Source

  • How trees secretly talk to and share with each other

    Trees secretly talk to each other underground. They’re passing information and resources to and from each other through a network of mycorrhizal fungi—mykós means fungus and riza means root in Greek—a mat of long, thin filaments that connect an estimated 90% of land plants. Scientists call the fungi the Wood Wide Web because ‘adult’ trees can share sugars to younger trees, sick trees can send their remaining resources back into the network for others, and they can communicate with each other about dangers like insect infestations.

    Source:

    https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/the-wood-wide-web-how-trees-secretly-talk-to-and-share-with-each-other