I like Graziano's theory of consciousness.
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-consciousness-works/
I have generally been inclined to agree with JKC that natural selection can't act on
consciousness, only on intelligence; so consciousness is either a necessary byproduct of
intelligence or it's a spandrel. But under Graziano's theory it's a way of augmenting or
improving intelligence within constraints of limited computational resources. So it would
be subject to natural selection. It also shows how to make intelligence machines without
consciousness (albeit less efficient ones).
Brent
On 3/7/2015 5:45 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
Isn't this the Graziano fellow who back in Dec. 2013 write an article in AEON about
uploading? Ah! yes he is.
http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/virtual-afterlives-will-transform-humanity/
-----Original Message-----
From: meekerdb <[email protected]>
To: EveryThing <[email protected]>
Sent: Fri, Mar 6, 2015 8:06 pm
Subject: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
/
/ /The attention schema theory satisfies two problems of understanding consciousness,
said Aaron Schurger, a senior researcher of cognitive neuroscience at the Brain Mind
Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who received
his doctorate from Princeton in 2009. The "easy" problem relates to correlating brain
activity with the presence and absence of consciousness, he said. The "hard" problem has
been to determine how consciousness comes about in the first place. Essentially all
existing theories of consciousness have addressed only the easy problem. Graziano shows
that the solution to the hard problem might be that the brain describes some of the
information that it is actively processing as conscious because that is a useful
description of its own process of attention, Schurger said./ /
/ /
/ /"Michael's theory explains the connection between attention and consciousness in a
very elegant and compelling way," Schurger said./ /
/ /
/ /"His theory is the first theory that I know of to take both the easy and the hard
problems head on," he said. "That is a gaping hole in all other modern theories, and it
is deftly plugged by Michael's theory. Even if you think his theory is wrong, his theory
reminds us that any theory that avoids the hard problem has almost certainly missed the
mark, because a plausible solution — his theory — exists that does not appeal to magic
or mysterious, as-yet-unexplained phenomena."/
Read the rest:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S38/91/90C37/index.xml?section=featured
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything
List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything
List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
