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Category: Consciousness

Consciousness science needs to study less complex organisms

Consciousness science needs to study less complex organisms

Kristin Andrews writes: Twenty-five years ago, the burgeoning science of consciousness studies was rife with promise. With cutting-edge neuroimaging tools leading to new research programmes, the neuroscientist Christof Koch was so optimistic, he bet a case of wine that we’d uncover its secrets by now. The philosopher David Chalmers had serious doubts, because consciousness research is, to put it mildly, difficult. Even what Chalmers called the easy problem of consciousness is hard, and that’s what the bet was about –…

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Rats have imagination, study suggests

Rats have imagination, study suggests

Science reports: Close your eyes and picture yourself running an errand across town. You can probably imagine the turns you’d need to take and the landmarks you’d encounter. This ability to conjure such scenarios in our minds is thought to be crucial to humans’ capacity to plan ahead. But it may not be uniquely human: Rats also seem to be able to “imagine” moving through mental environments, researchers report today in Science. Rodents trained to navigate within a virtual arena…

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The value of wild ideas

The value of wild ideas

Anil Seth writes: Earlier this month, the consciousness science community erupted into chaos. An open letter, signed by 124 researchers—some specializing in consciousness and others not—made the provocative claim that one of the most widely discussed theories in the field, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), should be considered “pseudoscience.” The uproar that followed sent consciousness social media into a doom spiral of accusation and recrimination, with the fallout covered in Nature, New Scientist, and elsewhere. Calling something pseudoscience is pretty much…

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If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?

If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?

Science reports: In 2021, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines—and got himself fired—when he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he’d been testing, was sentient. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially so-called large language models such as LaMDA and ChatGPT, can certainly seem conscious. But they’re trained on vast amounts of text to imitate human responses. So how can we really know? Now, a group of 19 computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers has come up with an approach: not a single definitive…

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We may have found the part of the brain where conscious experience lives

We may have found the part of the brain where conscious experience lives

Science Alert reports: New research sheds light on a tricky idea of consciousness: There’s a difference between what the brain takes in and what we’re consciously aware of taking in. Scientists now think they’ve pinpointed the brain region where that conscious awareness is managed. The team, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), in the US, found sustained brain activity in the occipitotemporal area of the visual cortex in the back…

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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends as philosopher beats neuroscientist

Decades-long bet on consciousness ends as philosopher beats neuroscientist

Nature reports: A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet…

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Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference

Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination. Brain scan studies have repeatedly found that seeing something and imagining it evoke highly similar patterns of neural activity. Yet for most of us, the subjective experiences they produce are…

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Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain

Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain

PsyPost reports: A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has presented preliminary findings suggesting there can be a surge of brain activity linked to consciousness during the dying process. The new study aimed to investigate the brain activity of patients during the dying process, particularly focusing on whether there are any neural correlates of consciousness. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported by some cardiac arrest survivors and are described as highly vivid and real-like…

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ChatGPT can’t think – consciousness is something entirely different to today’s AI

ChatGPT can’t think – consciousness is something entirely different to today’s AI

Illus_man / Shutterstock By Philip Goff, Durham University There has been shock around the world at the rapid rate of progress with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence created with what’s known as large language models (LLMs). These systems can produce text that seems to display thought, understanding and even creativity. But can these systems really think and understand? This is not a question that can be answered through technological advance, but careful philosophical analysis and argument tells us the answer…

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Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking

Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking

Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio write: Please pause for a moment and notice what you are feeling now. Perhaps you notice a growing snarl of hunger in your stomach or a hum of stress in your chest. Perhaps you have a feeling of ease and expansiveness, or the tingling anticipation of a pleasure soon to come. Or perhaps you simply have a sense that you exist. Hunger and thirst, pain, pleasure and distress, along with the unadorned but relentless feelings…

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Why are most of us stuck with a belief in the soul?

Why are most of us stuck with a belief in the soul?

David P Barash writes: Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’. And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held. What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people? Although there is a large literature on the costs and benefits – psychological and economic – of traditional religion, there is a dearth of comparable research on religion’s near-universal handmaiden, the soul….

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How blindsight answers the hard problem of consciousness

How blindsight answers the hard problem of consciousness

Nicholas Humphrey writes: The cover of New Scientist magazine 50 years ago showed a picture of a rhesus monkey, with the headline ‘A Blind Monkey That Sees Everything’. The monkey, named Helen, was part of a study into the neuropsychology of vision, led by Lawrence (Larry) Weiskrantz in the psychology laboratory at the University of Cambridge. In 1965, he had surgically removed the primary visual cortex at the back of Helen’s brain. Following the operation, Helen appeared to be quite…

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The human mind is not meant to be awake after midnight, scientists warn

The human mind is not meant to be awake after midnight, scientists warn

Science Alert reports: In the middle of the night, the world can sometimes feel like a dark place. Under the cover of darkness, negative thoughts have a way of drifting through your mind, and as you lie awake, staring at the ceiling, you might start craving guilty pleasures, like a cigarette or a carb-heavy meal. Plenty of evidence suggests the human mind functions differently if it is awake at nighttime. Past midnight, negative emotions tend to draw our attention more…

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The mysterious inner life of the octopus

The mysterious inner life of the octopus

Martha Henriques writes: It was a big night for Inky the octopus. The day’s visitors had been and gone, and now his room in the aquarium was deserted. In a rare oversight, the lid of his tank had been left ajar. The common New Zealand octopus had been without female company for some time, sharing a tank with only a fellow male, Blotchy. The loose lid provided Inky with an opportunity. With eight strong suckered limbs and, quite possibly, intimate…

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The octopus dreams of crabs

The octopus dreams of crabs

Laura Miller writes: John James Audubon was wrong. The great naturalist may have illustrated and compiled 1827’s Birds of America, a pioneering work of ornithology, but thanks to a series of sloppy experiments on turkey vultures, he insisted that birds can’t smell. This was taken for granted until the 1960s when two women scientists in New Zealand proved otherwise, but we are still discovering just how discerning bird’s noses can be. In the 1990s, biologist Gabrielle Nevitt was puzzling, as…

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How I started to see trees as smart

How I started to see trees as smart

Matthew Hutson writes: A couple of decades ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, I was marching up a mountain solo under the influence of LSD. Halfway to the top, I took a break near a scrubby tree pushing up through the rocky soil. Gulping water and catching my breath, I admired both its beauty and its resilience. Its twisty, weathered branches had endured by wresting moisture and nutrients from seemingly unwelcoming terrain, solving a puzzle beyond my…

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