Your search

In authors or contributors
  • This paper proposes a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates approximations to the concepts of consciousness, imagination, and emotion. To emulate the empirically established cognitive efficacy of conscious as opposed to non-conscious information processing in the mammalian brain, the architecture adopts a model of information flow from global workspace theory. Cognitive functions such as anticipation and planning are realised through internal simulation of interaction with the environment. Action selection, in both actual and internally simulated interaction with the environment, is mediated by affect. An implementation of the architecture is described which is based on weightless neurons and is used to control a simulated robot.

  • To understand the mind and its place in Nature is one of the great intellectual challenges of our time, a challenge that is both scientific and philosophical. How does cognition influence an animal's behaviour? What are its neural underpinnings? How is the inner life of a human being constituted? What are the neural underpinnings of the conscious condition? This book approaches each of these questions from a scientific standpoint. But it contends that, before we can make progress on them, we have to give up the habit of thinking metaphysically, a habit that creates a fog of philosophical confusion. From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character of the conscious condition. Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical systems, it proposes an empirical theory of this three-way relationship whose principles, not being tied to the contingencies of biology or physics, are applicable to the whole space of possible minds in which humans and other animals are included. The book provides a joined-up theory of consciousness.

  • This paper critically assesses the anti-functionalist stance on consciousness adopted by certain advocates of integrated information theory (IIT), a corollary of which is that human-level artificial intelligence implemented on conventional computing hardware is necessarily not conscious. The critique draws on variations of a well-known gradual neuronal replacement thought experiment, as well as bringing out tensions in IIT's treatment of self-knowledge. The aim, though, is neither to reject IIT outright nor to champion functionalism in particular. Rather, it is suggested that both ideas have something to offer a scientific understanding of consciousness, as long as they are not dressed up as solutions to illusory metaphysical problems. As for human-level AI, we must await its development before we can decide whether or not to ascribe consciousness to it.

Last update from database: 3/23/25, 8:36 AM (UTC)