Consciousness, cognition, and context: extending the global neuronal workspace model

The human brain processes a wide variety of inputs and does so either consciously or subconsciously. According to the Global Workspace theory, conscious processing involves broadcasting of information to several regions of the brain and subconscious processing involves more localized processing. This theoretical paper aims to expand on some of the aspects of the Global Workspace theory: how the properties of incoming information result in it being processed subconsciously or ...

The quest to understand consciousness, once the purview of philosophers and theologians, is now actively pursued by scientists of many stripes. We examine consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations. In the spirit of Alan Turing's simple yet powerful definition...

This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0. IIT aims to account for the properties of experience in physical (operational) terms. It identifies the essential properties of experience (axioms), infers the necessary and sufficient properties that its substrate must satisfy (postulates), and expresses them in mathematical terms. In principle, the postulates can be applied to any system of units in a state to determine whether it is conscious, to what degree, and...

This article provides an analytical framework for how to simulate human-like thought processes within a computer. It describes how attention and memory should be structured, updated, and utilized to search for associative additions to the stream of thought. The focus is on replicating the dynamics of the mammalian working memory system, which features two forms of persistent activity: sustained firing (preserving information on the order of seconds) and synaptic potentiation ...

The subjective experience of consciousness is at once familiar and yet deeply mysterious. Strategies exploring the top-down mechanisms of conscious thought within the human brain have been unable to produce a generalized explanatory theory that scales through evolution and can be applied to artificial systems. Information Flow Theory (IFT) provides a novel framework for understanding both the development and nature of consciousness in any system capable of processing informat...

The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to throw some light on it. Present neuroscience knowledge allows envisioning the neural processes behind the physical aspects of consciousness, however what may be behind the experiences of it, which has no physical insignia, has remained a m...

The quest to understand consciousness, once the purview of philosophers and theologians, is now actively pursued by scientists of many stripes. This paper studies consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science. It formalizes the Global Workspace Theory (GWT) originated by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars and further developed by him, Stanislas Dehaene, and others. Our major contribution lies in the precise formal definition of a Conscious Turing Mach...

The multifaceted nature of experience poses a challenge to the study of consciousness. Traditional neuroscientific approaches often concentrate on isolated facets, such as perceptual awareness or the global state of consciousness and construct a theory around the relevant empirical paradigms and findings. Theories of consciousness are, therefore, often difficult to compare; indeed, there might be little overlap in the phenomena such theories aim to explain. Here, we take a di...

Understanding the neural mechanism underlying subjective representation has become a central endeavor in cognitive-neuroscience. In theories of conscious perception, stimulus gaining conscious access is usually considered as a discrete neuronal event to be characterized in time or space, sometimes refer to as a 'conscious episode'. Surprisingly, the alternative hypothesis according to which conscious perception is a dynamic process has been rarely considered. Here, we discuss...

Beings, animate or inanimate, are dynamical systems which continuously interact with the (external and /or internal) environment through the physical or physiologic interfaces of their Kantian (representational) realities. And the nature of their interactions is determined by the inner workings of their systems. It is from this perspective that this work attempts to address some of the long-held philosophical questions, major one among them consciousness-- in the context of t...