Emergence of Consciousness Page

I created this page to share and discuss our models for the emergence of consciousness from matter. Please share your models and add discussion so we can all see and think about it. We will use this page in the end to write up a summary and hopefully compare and contrast the models and discuss what properties of consciousness can be explained by what model.

Thanks, Alireza

Working Ideas

(1) Consciousness as Hyper Attractors of Brain (Alireza)

In this schema states of our mind/consciousness as attractors of the dynamics that arise from our brain. We receive sensory information that act as perturbations pushing the trajectory out of a basin of attractor and into a new basin.

= (2) Reference! Tegmark - The fourth state of matter

This can be an interesting starting point... at least one perspective on the topic http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf Sarah

Perspective Summaries

Sean Hayes

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

This paper makes the important distinction between the 'easy' and 'hard' problems of consciousness in relative terms. I think it would be useful to use this framework to focus the precise problems we're investigating around consciousness.

My definition for consciousness at it's simplest form is just having subjective experience. While some of the discussion this afternoon touched on integrative brain problems (which falls under 'easy' problems of consciousness in the above, as a way to describe issues of cognition), my question is whether this property of consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. While this is difficult to address objectively, I think it can be approached from our perspectives by comparing consciousness with other emergent phenomena.

The big question that I've been trying to resolve myself along this line of thinking is related to the 'binding problem' (1,2). I'm probably bastardizing the definition a bit, but essentially the issue is conscious experience is not a distributed phenomenon but rather that experience is inherently singular - to me this is entirely distinct from the emergence, which is inherently a distributed feature of a complex system. Moreover, our conscious experience not only receives input from the complex, distributed network of our brain, but itself can cause changes in brain behavior and function. Is this actually an emergent phenomenon, or the concentration of information into a centralized control (our subjective experience)? Are there characteristics of subjective experience which do act the way we expect emergent phenomena to behave?