Genes vs Cultures vs Consciousness: A Brief Story of Our Computational Minds

by Andres Campero

Integrated Information Theory of C...

the degree of integration in some mathematically specified way within a computational system is what determi...

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) argues that while reptiles are conscious, amphibians are not.

2017].

Published post-humously

Mary the color scientist. Imagine Mary who knows everything there is to know about vision and its physical processes in the brain; she knows about color, about wavelengths in the light spectrum and about all the different neural computations involved in the brain. The one caveat is that Mary has lived all of her life in a black-and-white room and has never actually seen any color. Isn’t it obvious that Mary would still learn something, namely the experience of seeing red, when seeing it for the first time?

Frank Jackson

Not all knowledge is symbolic and not all knowledge can be expressed in language.

The only way we have right now to learn to juggle is by juggling. If there was another way of intervening in the brain to tune the neurons in the right way,

the Chinese nation thought experiment, this time about the simulation of brains. What would happen if every Chinese citizen coordinated to simulate the computations of a brain in order to replicate the actions of all its neurons, perhaps using telephones or walkie-talkies? Would such coordination result in a conscious mind that feels like a human, or like a lion for the matter? After all, we have been arguing that the mind is computational and that what matters is the flow of information independent of the physical substrate in which it is implemented. Where would that consciousness be? In all of China?

blindness denial are not able to see but are somehow unaware of the fact.

split brains which occurs when the corpus callosum that joins both hemisphere is severed

an image can be presented to one eye so that it reaches only one of the hemispheres. If it is the left, then the subject can describe the image with language and can point to indicated objects with the right hand. If instead the image only reaches the right hemisphere, the left hand can still point to the indicated objects but when an explanation is demanded the subject invents explanations based only on what the left hemisphere had access to

subliminal pictures can affect behavior, influence choices, and even trigger motivations without any awareness.

patients with blindsight who cannot consciously see but can still accurately behave as if they were seeing. Almost like a ‘philosophical zombie’, such a patient might consistently avoid the image of a burning house without ever reporting the experience of observing fire.

Moran Cerf

some people to call free will “an illusion”.

pragmatism.

claustrum

Genes, Cultures, and Consciousnesses are the independent allies that constitute our minds.

As we continue to understand the mind, Consciousness is becoming independent of Genes and Cultures, which evolve through different computational processes and at slower timescales.

​Because only Consciousnesses experience and desire anything at all, they are the only component that really matters. We are Consciousnesses. Everything we experience by definition is.

all the non-logical aspects of our mind - such as emotions, sentiments, intuition, and consciousness – are also computational.

Ray Kurzweil

the case of domesticated animals such as pigs; while their Genes are extremely successful being taken care of by humans, their Consciousnesses experience a living hell.

Will Consciousness stop depending on a physical body?

A Star Trek episode was on this topic

Demis Hassabis,

Nakama

Josh Tenenbaum

Morality, like other sentiments and feelings, can be favorably selected in an evolutionary process as a heuristic shortcut to rationality.

The Kantian Categorical Imperative, “do to others what you would like them to do to you”