A Framework for Conscious Information Processing

The purpose of this article is to provide an overall critical appraisal of Integrated Information Theory(IIT) of consciousness. We explore how it has evolved and what problems are involved in the theory. IIT is a hypothesis that consciousness can be explained in terms of integrated information. It argues that a number of fundamental properties of experience can be properly analyzed and explained by physical systems' informational properties. Throughout the last decade, there ...

While questions of a functional localization of consciousness in the brain have been the subject of myriad studies, the idea of a temporal access code as a specific brain mechanism for consciousness has remained a neglected possibility. Dresp-Langley and Durup (2009, 2012) proposed a theoretical approach in terms of a temporal access mechanism for consciousness based on its two universally recognized properties. Consciousness is limited in processing capacity and described by...

A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's worldview. The contextuality of one's conscious experience both enhances and constrains the contextuality of one's behavior. Since we cannot know first-hand the conscious experience of another, it is by way of behavioral contextuality that...

This article questions the widespread assumption that there are brain representations that will always remain unconscious in the sense of being inaccessible to individual awareness under any circumstances. This implies that some part of the knowledge generated by the brain is once and for always excluded from consciousness and, therefore, from being communicated to the outside world. This standpoint neglects the possibility that the human brain might have a capacity for gener...

This report enlists 13 functional conditions cashed out in computational terms that have been argued to be constituent of conscious valenced experience. These are extracted from existing empirical and theoretical literature on, among others, animal sentience, medical disorders, anaesthetics, philosophy, evolution, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.

I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles. This approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to a...

We adapt an information theory analysis of interacting cognitive biological and social modules to the problem of the global neuronal workspace, the current standard neuroscience picture of consciousness. Tunable punctuation emerges in a natural manner, suggesting the possibility of fitting appropriate phase transition power law, and, away from transition, generalized Onsager relation expressions, to observational data on conscious reaction. The development can be extended in ...

To truly eliminate Cartesian ghosts from the science of consciousness, we must describe consciousness as an aspect of the physical. Integrated Information Theory states that consciousness arises from intrinsic information generated by dynamical systems; however existing formulations of this theory are not applicable to standard models of fundamental physical entities. Modern physics has shown that fields are fundamental entities, and in particular that the electromagnetic fie...

This review presents recent and older results on elementary quantitative and qualitative aspects of consciousness and cognition and tackles the question "What is consciousness?" conjointly from biological, neuroscience-cognitive, physical and mathematical points of view. It proposes to unify various results and theories by means of information topology. The first chapter presents the postulates and results on elementary perception at various organizational scales of the ner...

One of the current AI issues depicted in popular culture is the fear of conscious super AIs that try to take control over humanity. And as computational power goes upwards and that turns more and more into a reality, understanding artificial brains might be increasingly important to control and drive AI towards the benefit of our societies. This paper proposes a base framework to aid the development of autonomous multipurpose artificial brains. To approach that, we propose to...