Search results for " consciousness"

Ex Machina: Is Ava a Person?

2021

What does it mean to be a person? Is it possible to create an artificial person? In this essay, I consider the case of Ava, an advanced artificial general intelligence from the movie Ex Machina. I suggest we should interpret the movie as testing whether Ava is a person. I start out by discussing what it means to be a person, before I discuss whether Ava is such a person. I end by briefly looking at the ethics of the case of Ava and artificial personhood. I conclude, among some other things, that consciousness is a necessary requirement for personhood, and that one of the main obstacles for artificial personhood is artificial consciousness.

Music and Action

2013

Music performance includes planning, initiation, execution, monitoring, and correction of actions. This makes music performance a valuable tool for the study of human action and its neural correlates. This chapter reports action-related processes evoked by the perception of actions, and processes of error correction during music performance. Neuroscientific studies showed that, during the perception of action, neural systems are active that are also active during the performance of such actions. This supports the "common coding principle" stating that the late stages of perception and the early stages of action share a common representational format (such as the same neural code). Studies o…

Musical expertise modulates functional connectivity of limbic regions during continuous music listening.

2015

Music is known to be an important facet of all human cultures (Merriam, 1964). Listening to music in order to influence moods, evoke strong emotions, and derive pleasure is becoming increasingly common, especially in this day and age when access to music is easy and quick. In recent years, exploring the neural correlates of musical emotions has attracted the attention of neuroscientists (Brattico & Pearce, 2013; Koelsch, Fritz, v. Cramon, Muller, & Friederici, 2006). However, the majority of these studies have not accounted for the effect of musical expertise, despite increasing evidence of structural and functional differences between musicians and nonmusicians, particularly in the regions…

Electrophysiological Correlates of Aesthetic Music Processing

2009

We analyzed the processes of making aesthetic judgments of music, focusing on the differences between music experts and laypersons. Sixteen students of musicology and 16 control subjects (also students) judged the aesthetic value as well as the harmonic correctness of chord sequences. Event-related potential (ERP) data indicate differences between experts and laypersons in making aesthetic judgments at three different processing stages. Additionally, effects of expertise on ERP components that have previously been proven to be sensitive to musical training were replicated. The study thus provides insights into the effects of musical expertise on neural correlates of aesthetic music processi…

Educazione autentica, coscienze prepedagogica, pedagogia spontanea nel progetto metodico di una "pedagogia fondamentale"

2012

L’approccio di una pedagogia metodicamente strutturata permette di indagare in profondità i fenomeni educativi, poiché ne coglie la realtà oggettiva che rivela aspetti importanti del modo di essere nel mondo proprio dell’educando e dell’educatore, e che prospetta il loro autentico poter essere. L’educazione intesa come esperienza vissuta nella relazione interpersonale è infatti una realtà complessa, che per essere compresa adeguatamente richiede approcci disciplinari, logiche e linguaggi diversi. L’orizzonte di senso in cui la questione “pedagogica” dell’educazione autentica si presenta è l’esperienza quotidiana dell’educatore e dell’educando. La coscienza non edotta dal sapere pedagogico ―…

Cytoskeleton and Consciousness: An Evolutionary Based Review

2015

The fields of quantum biology and physics are now starting to unite to solve the mysteries associated with the field of evolutionary biology. One such question is the origination and propagation of consciousness which has always been ambiguous and in order to understand this concept, many theories have been proposed by several philosophers and scientists. This review paper agrees with the idea, that evolution is not a random process but hypothesizes, that its succession was managed by the expanding level of consciousness due to cell division and cell differentiation. Several theories propose that the cytoskeleton and its proteins are promoters for consciousness in the brain, which propagate…

Semantic and action tool knowledge in the brain: Identifying common and distinct networks.

2021

Most cognitive models of apraxia assume that impaired tool use results from a deficit occurring at the conceptual level, which contains dedicated information about tool use, namely, semantic and action tool knowledge. Semantic tool knowledge contains information about the prototypical use of familiar tools, such as function (e.g., a hammer and a mallet share the same purpose) and associative relations (e.g., a hammer goes with a nail). Action tool knowledge contains information about how to manipulate tools, such as hand posture and kinematics. The present review aimed to better understand the neural correlates of action and semantic tool knowledge, by focusing on activation, stimulation an…

How to integrate dreaming into a general theory of consciousness—A critical review of existing positions and suggestions for future research

2011

In this paper, we address the different ways in which dream research can contribute to interdisciplinary consciousness research. As a second global state of consciousness aside from wakefulness, dreaming is an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness. However, programmatic suggestions for integrating dreaming into broader theories of consciousness, for instance by regarding dreams as a model system of standard or pathological wake states, have not yielded straightforward results. We review existing proposals for using dreaming as a model system, taking into account concerns about the concept of modeling and the adequacy and practical feasibility of dreaming as a mod…

2020

Abstract This article discusses a hypothesis recently put forward by Kanai et al., according to which information generation constitutes a functional basis of, and a sufficient condition for, consciousness. Information generation involves the ability to compress and subsequently decompress information, potentially after a temporal delay and adapted to current purposes. I will argue that information generation should not be regarded as a sufficient condition for consciousness, but could serve as what I will call a “minimal unifying model of consciousness.” A minimal unifying model (MUM) specifies at least one necessary feature of consciousness, characterizes it in a determinable way, and sho…

Towards a model-based cognitive neuroscience of stopping - a neuroimaging perspective.

2018

Our understanding of the neural correlates of response inhibition has greatly advanced over the last decade. Nevertheless the specific function of regions within this stopping network remains controversial. The traditional neuroimaging approach cannot capture many processes affecting stopping performance. Despite the shortcomings of the traditional neuroimaging approach and a great progress in mathematical and computational models of stopping, model-based cognitive neuroscience approaches in human neuroimaging studies are largely lacking. To foster model-based approaches to ultimately gain a deeper understanding of the neural signature of stopping, we outline the most prominent models of re…