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Category: Consciousness

Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be

Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be

Anil K. Seth, Ned Block, and Giulio Tononi, write: Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become…

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David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

  Why did intelligence evolve in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the nature of intelligence, information theory, consciousness, and whether AI is actually intelligent at all with David Krakauer, evolutionary biologist and president of the Santa Fe Institute. Can you conceive of life without intelligence, or intelligence without life? We parse the difference between intelligence and being alive and whether you can be one without the other. What does it mean for something to…

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Antonio Damasio argues that without feelings, true intelligence cannot exist

Antonio Damasio argues that without feelings, true intelligence cannot exist

In a review of Antonio Damasio’s new book, Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness, David Eagleman writes: The part of the mind that Damasio says has been too long underappreciated is the feeling mind, built on interoception, which includes the continuous monitoring of respiration, temperature, heartbeat, blood circulation, blood chemistry, visceral musculature and other internal affairs. These three categories [the perceptual mind, the reflective/linguistic mind, and the feeling mind], he explains, have different biological foundations, different evolutionary ages and…

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Human experience cannot be captured in data

Human experience cannot be captured in data

Liam Spradlin writes: According to computism, the world, including humans, can be computed: the bits that everything is made of can be represented and manipulated as data. The Universe can be governed, essentially, by code. A tall modern building with a cloudy sky, cars parked in front, a person walking, and trees and grass in foreground. Datacenter AMS1 at the Science Park in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2021. Photo by Anthony Deutsch/Reuters Tech leaders have made enormous claims about how computation can…

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A mitochondrial theory of mind

A mitochondrial theory of mind

Rachel Nuwer writes: It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point,…

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For both consciousness and AI, attention is all you need

For both consciousness and AI, attention is all you need

Michael Graziano writes: The most energy-expensive organ in the body is the brain. The human brain, for example, coming in at about 2% of the body’s mass, uses 20% of the body’s energy. Neural tissue is so costly that evolution does not generally favor large brains. Otherwise, the entire animal kingdom would have evolved giant ones, instead of just a few species that have found a way to exploit that trait. To pack as much capacity in as small a…

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The brain processes language even under anesthesia, a new study finds

The brain processes language even under anesthesia, a new study finds

Time reports: Nestled in the core of the brain is the hippocampus, a little curve of tissue central to memory and learning. It serves as a processing center for our experiences, helping organize information as it comes in. The hippocampus does that when we’re awake—and, a new study suggests, even when we’re unconscious. The small study, published recently in the journal Nature, drew on data from seven people who had surgery to remove portions of their brains as a treatment…

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Massive new dream database reveals clues about consciousness during sleep

Massive new dream database reveals clues about consciousness during sleep

PsyPost reports: An international collaboration of scientists has created the largest-ever public database of brain activity recordings and accompanying dream reports. In a first analysis of this resource, the researchers confirmed that dreaming is not exclusive to the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, finding that when conscious experiences occur in deeper sleep, the brain exhibits patterns of activity that more closely resemble wakefulness. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications. For millennia, dreams have been a source…

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Can computers think? No, they can’t actually do anything

Can computers think? No, they can’t actually do anything

Alva Noë writes: Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute. Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare. We need to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech. But it ought to be possible to do so without…

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The new science of animal minds

The new science of animal minds

Brandon Keim writes: Back when I first started writing about scientific research on animal minds, I had internalized a straightforward historical narrative: The western intellectual tradition held animals to be unintelligent, but thanks to recent advances in the science, we were learning otherwise. The actual history is so much more complicated. The denial of animal intelligence does have deep roots, of course. You can trace a direct line from Aristotle, who considered animals capable of feeling only pain and hunger,…

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Why intelligence exists only in the eye of the beholder

Why intelligence exists only in the eye of the beholder

Abigail Desmond and Michael Haslam write: What has intelligence? Slime moulds, ants, fifth-graders, shrimp, neurons, ChatGPT, fish shoals, border collies, crowds, birds, you and me? All of the above? Some? Or, at the risk of sounding transgressive: maybe none? The question is a perennial one, often dusted off in the face of a previously unknown animal behaviour, or new computing devices that are trained to do human things and then do those things well. We might intuitively feel our way…

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Do plants have minds?

Do plants have minds?

Rachael Petersen writes: Gustav Theodor Fechner championed the idea that plants have souls – something we might call ‘consciousness’ today. I first learned of him in an interdisciplinary reading group on plant consciousness that I co-lead at Harvard University. We convene biologists, theologians, artists and ethologists to explore the burgeoning literature on plant life. We found Fechner covered in the New York Times bestselling book by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins titled The Secret Life of Plants (1973). Michael Pollan…

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Consciousness came before life

Consciousness came before life

Stuart Hameroff, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, and Dante Lauretta writes: Most scientists and philosophers believe that life came before consciousness. Life appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago; consciousness and feelings, it’s said, evolved later due to complex biological information processing, perhaps only recently in brains with language and tool-making abilities. In fact, though, there’s good reason to think that consciousness preceded life, and was central to making life and evolution possible. What is life? It is often described as its…

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Optical illusion reveals key brain rule that governs consciousness

Optical illusion reveals key brain rule that governs consciousness

Live Science reports: Optical illusions play on the brain’s biases, tricking it into perceiving images differently than how they really are. And now, in mice, scientists have harnessed an optical illusion to reveal hidden insights into how the brain processes visual information. The research focused on the neon-color-spreading illusion, which incorporates patterns of thin lines on a solid background. Parts of these lines are a different color — such as lime green, in the example above — and the brain…

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Insects and other animals have consciousness, experts assert in new declaration

Insects and other animals have consciousness, experts assert in new declaration

Dan Falk writes: In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun. The study on playful bees…

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The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

Alex Blasdel writes: At the time [Jimo] Borjigin [a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan] began her research into Patient One, the scientific understanding of death had reached an impasse. Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies. A handful of those…

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