Post on 13-Jan-2016
Theoretic Approaches to Consciousness
• Dualism (mind does not equal body)
• Materialism (mind equals body)
• Neither approach satisfies
Refinements
• Higher order thought (HOT) theories (Rosenthal)
• Brain has a neural state corresponding to being aware of a separate first order neural state, example: first order state is the neural correlate of looking at a red object, second order state is that associated with being aware of “red”
Refinements
• Functionalism (Searle)
• Pain example: Pain understood as the collection of the input of noxious stimuli; behaviors resulting,such as withdrawal, crying etc: to expressed desires for the pain to go away. Any machine that replicated these functions would be in pain. Exact neural state does not matter.
Refinements
• Global workspace theory (Baars)
• Analogy to theatre in the mind. A spot light reveals what is conscious and this feeds back to rest of unconscious mind.
Refinements
• Dynamic core (Edelman)
• Connections of neural states feeding back and forth between cortex and thalamus
Refinements
• Computational (Pinker)
• String Theory
• Panpsychism or variants
Refinements
• Quantum Theories (Hamerhoff)
• DISCUSSION (Joe Brophy)
Why do we need a theory about brains and mind?
• Jeff Hawkins
• http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing.html
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Further Reading
• Max Velmans• Christof Koch• Stuart Hameroff• Paula Churchland• Dan Dennett• Paul Davies• Stephen Priest• Douglas Hofstadter
• Steven Johnson• Howard Gardner• Gerald Edelman• Oliver Sacks• Daniel Levitin• Jonah Lehrer• John Searle• Rita Carver
Further Reading
• Antonio Damasio• John Holland• Michael Gazzaniga• Francis Crick• Bernard Baars• V. Ramachandran• Adam Zeman• Stephen Pinker
• Nicholas Humphrey• Joseph Ledoux• Guilio Tononi• David Chalmers• Semir Zeki• William Calvin• Anthony Damasio• Roger Penrose
Compendia
• Blackwell Companion to Consciousness ed Max Velmans and Susan Schneider 2007
• Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness Bernard Baars, William Banks, and James Newman eds 2003
Useful Web Sites
• Skeptic.com• Sciencenews.org• Mindhacks.com• (BBC All in the Mind)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/• http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com/• http://www.neuroscience-gateway.org/
index.shtml
Useful Web Sites
• http://channeln.blogspot.com/
• UCTV.edu
• http://www.uctv.tv/
• http://www.edge.org/
• http://research.google.com/video.html
• http://www.ted.com/
• http://www.sfn.org/
Useful Web Sites
• http://www.mindscience.org/index.cfm
• http://www.nsi.edu/
• http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/tucson2008.htm
• http://neukominstitute.com/
• http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
Useful Web Sites
• http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/IllusionForum/basics/visual/index-e.html
• http://cogprints.org/ (huge bibliography)
• http://www.sciam.com/section.cfm?id=mindmatters
• http://consc.net/mindpapers (huge reference list)
Useful Web Sites
• http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/
• http://www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org/
• http://neuropolitics.org/
• http://www.neuroesthetics.org/
• http://plaisir.berkeley.edu/
• http://www.nature.com/neurosci/neuropod/index-2008-05-19.html
Useful Web Sites
• http://www.dana.org/
• http://www.ucsd.tv/greymatters/
• http://www.pbs.org/saf/archive.htm