#affect consciousness

[selfawarepatterns]

The marshmallow test and conscious feeling

The marshmallow test and conscious feeling

The recent news reports that cuttlefish are able to pass the marshmallow test are interesting. The classic marshmallow test involved giving a young child a marshmallow but promising them a second one if they could hold off eating the first for 15 minutes. The kid was then left alone in a room with the first marshmallow for those 15 minutes, but monitored via a hidden camera. Some kids ate the…

View On WordPress

[selfawarepatterns]

Pain is information, but what is information?

Pain is information, but what is information?

From an evolutionary standpoint, why does pain exist?  The first naive answer most people reach for is that pain exists to make us take action to prevent damage.  If we touch a hot stove, pain makes us pull our hand back.

But that’s not right.  When we touch a hot surface, nociceptors in our hand send signals to the spinal cord, which often respond with a reflexive reaction, such as a withdrawal…

View On WordPress

[selfawarepatterns]

The response schema

Several months ago Michael Graziano, and colleagues, attempted a synthesis of three families of scientific theories of consciousness: global workspace theory (GWT), higher order theory (HOT), and his own attention schema theory (AST).

A quick (crudely simplistic) reminder: GWT posits that content becomes conscious when it is globally broadcast throughout the brain, HOT when a higher order…

View On WordPress

[selfawarepatterns]

Joseph LeDoux's theories on consciousness and emotions

Joseph LeDoux’s theories on consciousness and emotions

In the last post, I mentioned that I was reading Joseph LeDoux’s new book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this book.  As its title implies, it starts early in evolution, providing a lot of information on early life, although I didn’t find that the latter parts of the book, focused on consciousness…

View On WordPress

[selfawarepatterns]

Protecting AI welfare?

John Basl and Eric Schwitzgebel have a short article at Aeon arguing that AI (artificial intelligence) should enjoy the same protection as animals do for scientific research.  They make the point that while AI is a long way off from achieving human level intelligence, it may achieve animal level intelligence, such as the intelligence of a dog or mouse, sometime in the near future.

Animal research…

View On WordPress

[selfawarepatterns]

The construction of feelings

The construction of feelings

I’ve had a number of conversations lately on the subject of feelings, the affective states of having valences about conscious perception, such as fear, pain, joy, hunger, etc.  Apparently a lot of people view feelings as a very mysterious phenomenon.  While I’ll definitely agree that there are a lot of details still to be worked out, I don’t see the overall mechanism as that mysterious.  But…

View On WordPress