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Consciousness

At Mind Matters News: Are the brain cells in a dish that learned Pong conscious?

Eric Holloway: A couple other interesting results from the research. First, human-derived organoids always outperform mouse-derived organoids in terms of volley length. Second, even without negative feedback, when the paddle missed the pong ball, the organoids still learn to increase volley length. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: The brain stem, not the prefrontal cortex, may be the seat of consciousness

Neuropsychologist Mark Solms: a lot of evidence, suggests that the source of consciousness in the brain is in fact in the brain stem, which is a much more ancient, much more primitive structure that we share, not only with all other primates and all other mammals, but in fact, with all vertebrates. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Neuroscientist: Nervous systems alone do not cause consciousness

One-celled intelligence aside, it’s unclear how Antonio Damasio’s ladder of consciousness, built on self-balancing and death avoidance, gets us the human mind. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: GWT: A leading consciousness theory depends on information theory

If information flow in the brain is “largely unconstrained” by anatomical wiring, it’s easy to understand why we sense that we have “minds” apart from our brains. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Did minimal consciousness drive the Cambrian Explosion?

Eva Jablonka’s team makes the daring case, repurposing Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti’s origin of life studies. Where their approach differs from many is that they do not try to identify a mechanism of consciousness. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Defending the mind’s reality at a materialist cocktail party

What to say when you find yourself among self-assured elite sloganeers. The actual history of neuroscience in the last century has not been kind to materialist assertions and assumptions. Read More ›

Is panpsychism replacing materialism?

Panpsychism, in the form of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is a much more serious competitor to dualism and idealism than materialism could hope to be. Panpsychists are not trying to claim that consciousness is merely an illusion. They may be wrong but they aren't ridiculous. Read More ›

At Scientific American: Why we live in a simulation

This is likely intended as a spoof: "There is nothing in philosophy or science, no postulates, theories or laws, that would predict the emergence of this experience we call consciousness. Natural laws do not call for its existence, and it certainly does not seem to offer us any evolutionary advantages." But it happens to be true. Read More ›

Is science drifting from simple materialism to panpsychism?

It seems to have come down to a choice between “nothing is conscious” and “everything is conscious.” But materialism becomes incoherent when it requires us to believe that we only imagine we are conscious — that's a basic error in logic. Read More ›

At Nautilus: A bioelectric theory of consciousness

The hypothesis that consciousness is a function of bioelectric fields includes the notion that our individual cells are conscious. Levin and Dennett are willing to think of parts of the body as agents too. But from what we can tell, whole persons are not agents in Dennett's view. Read More ›