Modelling aspects of consciousness: a topological perspective
Mike Steel
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13 pages, 1 figure, (version 5 is a slightly revised version of version 4, which was a moderately revised version of 3 (which was identical to versions 1 and 2, except that the figure was reduced in size to allow easier downloads)
Attention Schema Theory (AST) is a recent proposal to provide a scientific explanation for the basis of subjective awareness. In AST, the brain constructs a representation of attention taking place in its own (and others') mind (`the attention schema'). Moreover, this representation is incomplete for efficiency reasons. This inherent incompleteness of the attention schema results in the inability of humans to understand how their own subjective awareness arises (related to the so-called `hard problem' of consciousness). Given this theory, the present paper asks whether a mind (either human or machine-based) that incorporates attention, and that contains a representation of its own attention, can ever have a complete representation. Using a simple yet general model and a mathematical argument based on classical topology, we show that a complete representation of attention is not possible, since it cannot faithfully represent streams of attention. In this way, the study supports one of the core aspects of AST, that the brain's representation of its own attention is necessarily incomplete.
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 the physicality of the dynamic systems.
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 nervous system and proposes the hypothesis of an electrodynamic intrinsic nature of consciousness which is sustained by an an…
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 of a computer, the Turing Machine (TM), and perspective of computational complexity theory, we formalize a modified ver…
Consciousness is supported by complex patterns of brain activity which are indicative of irreversible non-equilibrium dynamics. While the framework of stochastic thermodynamics has facilitated the understanding of physical systems of this kind, its application to infer the level of consciousness from empirical data remains elusive. We faced this challenge by calculating entropy production in a multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process fitted to fMRI brain activity recordings. To test this approach, we focused on the transition from wakefulness to deep sleep, revealing a monotonous relationship b…
The scope of human consciousness includes states departing from what most of us experience as ordinary wakefulness. These altered states of consciousness constitute a prime opportunity to study how global changes in brain activity relate to different varieties of subjective experience. We consider the problem of explaining how global signatures of altered consciousness arise from the interplay between large-scale connectivity and local dynamical rules that can be traced to known properties of neural tissue. For this purpose, we advocate a research program aimed at bridging the gap between bott…
To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behaviour. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be interpreted in a way that suggests consciousness is a product of the organization of energetic activity in the brain. The nature of energy itself, though, remains largely mysterious, and we do not fully understand how it contributes to brain function or consciousness. According to the principle outlined here, energy, along with forces and work, can be descr…
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states, which are pairwise orthogonal. In this formalism, I prove that a conscious observer is necessarily a physical object that can memorize local events by setting one of its parts in an exactly specified constant quantum state (hypotheses H1, H2 and H3). Then I define the probability of a future event as the proportion of initial observers, all identical, who will …
The scientific approach to understand the nature of consciousness revolves around the study of human brain. Neurobiological studies that compare the nervous system of different species have accorded highest place to the humans on account of various factors that include a highly developed cortical area comprising of approximately 100 billion neurons, that are intrinsically connected to form a highly complex network. Quantum theories of consciousness are based on mathematical abstraction and Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR Theory is one of the most promising ones. Inspired by Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR T…
In this theoretical work the temporal aspect of consciousness is analyzed. We start from the notion that while conscious experience seems to change constantly, yet for any of its contents to be consciously perceived they must last for some non-zero duration of time, which appears to constitute certain conflict. We posit that, in terms of phenomenological analysis of consciousness, the temporal aspect, and this apparent conflict in particular, might be the most basic property, likely inherent to any conceivable form of consciousness. It is then outlined how taking this perspective offers a conc…
Schizophrenic patients suffer from hallucination which its causality is not yet fully understood. This paper attempts to approach this mystery from the perspective of quantum mechanical theories. A novel approach has been adopted to demonstrate the hallucination as a time evolution of percepts basis states in the Hilbertian consciousness which are desynchronised from the time in real world. The method also extends his approach to predict mind and brain modulation through the correlation and coupling of consciousness and it reaches a clinically hypothetical outcome of inducing consciousness int…
Accumulating evidence indicates that the capacity to integrate information in the brain is a prerequisite for consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness provides a mathematical approach to quantifying the information integrated in a system, called integrated information, $Φ$. Integrated information is defined theoretically as the amount of information a system generates as a whole, above and beyond the sum of the amount of information its parts independently generate. IIT predicts that the amount of integrated information in the brain should reflect levels of conscious…
A Neurocomputational Account of Flexible Goal-directed Cognition and Consciousness: The Goal-Aligning Representation Internal Manipulation Theory (GARIM)
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy（意大利国家研究委员会认知科学与技术研究所）
The hard problem of consciousness is the question how subjective experience arises from brain matter. I suggest exploring the possibility that quantum physics could be part of the answer. The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective experience is difficult to understand from a classical physics perspective. In contrast, quantum entanglement is naturally both complex and unified. Moreover the concept of matter is much more subtle in quantum physics compared to classical physics, and quantum computing shows that quantum effects can be useful for information processing. Building on recent …
Objective. Modelling is an important way to study the working mechanism of brain. While the characterization and understanding of brain are still inadequate. This study tried to build a model of brain from the perspective of thermodynamics at system level, which brought a new thinking to brain modelling. Approach. Regarding brain regions as systems, voxels as particles, and intensity of signals as energy of particles, the thermodynamic model of brain was built based on canonical ensemble theory. Two pairs of activated regions and two pairs of inactivated brain regions were selected for compari…
Quantifying integrated information is a leading approach towards building a fundamental theory of consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) has gained attention in this regard due to its theoretically strong framework. However, it faces some limitations such as current state dependence, computationally expensive and inability to be applied to real brain data. On the other hand, Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI) is a clinical measure for distinguishing different levels of consciousness. Though PCI claims to capture the functional differentiation and integration in brain networks (s…
Mapping of Subjective Accounts into Interpreted Clusters (MOSAIC): Topic Modelling and LLM applied to Stroboscopic Phenomenology
University of Sussex（萨塞克斯大学）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Collective Act；Canadian Institute for Advanced Research（加拿大高级研究院）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
