Tag: theories-of-consciousness

The future of consciousness science is going through very interesting turbulent times. Three decades ago, the C-word was taboo in mainstream academia. Today, it is teeming with all sorts of approaches, techniques, and theories. Then, there wasn’t hardly any signal. Today, there is perhaps too much noise. Join us at the heart of consciousness science,…

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for consciousness in physical terms by identifying the essential properties of experience (axioms), and inferring the necessary and sufficient properties that its physical substrate must satisfy (postulates). In this talk I will present an outline of IIT 4.0’s account of some qualitative contents of experience.

This presentation is about whether we can learn anything about consciousness from the free energy principle (FEP). This presentation will first gently introduce the FEP to a general, nontechnical audience. The FEP says that anything with a Markov blanket will look as if it infers the statistics of other things “beyond” the blanket, to which it is…

Discussions about the nature of consciousness are typically couched in a way that endorses a tacit adult-centric and vision-based perspective. Here I will examine the nature of subjective experiences through a bottom-up developmental lens, drawing attention to experiencing subjects as embodied and situated organisms essentially concerned with self-preservation within a precarious environment. How do embodied…

Recent activities in virtually all fields engaged in consciousness studies indicate early signs of a structural turn, where verbal descriptions or simple formalizations of conscious experiences are replaced by structural tools, most notably mathematical spaces and mathematical structures. This might, on my view, lead to a novel phase in consciousness science that fundamentally changes how…

For centuries, consciousness was considered to be outside the reach of scientific investigation. Yet in recent decades, more and more studies have tried to probe the neural correlates of conscious experience, and several neuronally-inspired theories for consciousness have emerged. In this talk, I will focus on four leading theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW),…

In his seminal 1884 observation, Thomas Huxley likened the enigma of consciousness and its relation to nervous tissue to the inexplicable emergence of a djinn from Aladdin’s magic lamp. This metaphor strikingly encapsulates the persistent complexity of what is now known as the mind-body problem. Despite the exponential growth in our scientific understanding, particularly of…