The DemystifySci Podcast
Resonance Theory of Consciousness - Dr. Stephen Grossberg, Boston University
Episode guests
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Consciousness involves resonant brain states amplifying neuronal firings through critical feature selection.
- Consciousness aids adaptation by guiding effective actions based on vision and auditory experiences.
- Understanding consciousness requires probing internal mechanisms and subjective experiences beyond external behaviors.
- Brain mechanisms like boundary completion and surface filling ensure coherent visual perception through hierarchical processing stages.
Deep dives
Understanding the Hard Problem of Consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness revolves around explaining the existence of qualia or phenomenal experiences and why physical states are conscious rather than unconscious. This problem delves into the subjective aspect of thinking and perceiving, where there is a conscious mental state lighting up and directly appearing in the subject. Consciousness involves more than just a war of information processing; it includes a subjective experiential aspect that is not solely about processing information.
Resonant Brain States and Consciousness
Consciousness involves resonant brain states where interactions across multiple brain regions amplify and synchronize neuronal firings through reciprocal bottom-up and top-down signaling. These resonant states occur during a matching process where critical features are selected for attention. All conscious states are considered resonant states, highlighting the dynamical nature of brain activity during conscious experiences.
Functionality of Conscious Qualia
Consciousness serves the purpose of aiding adaptation to the environment by facilitating effective actions and behaviors. Vision allows for effective looking and reaching, while auditory consciousness supports effective speaking and communication, including activities like singing. Conscious feelings and experiences are geared towards achieving valuable goals and outcomes, demonstrating the functional role of consciousness in guiding behavior.
Importance of Properly Probing Consciousness
Addressing the idea that a robot could exhibit goal-oriented behaviors similar to consciousness underscores the necessity of probing consciousness accurately. Consciousness involves more than just external behavior and goal pursuit; it encompasses internal mechanisms and subjective experiences that are crucial for understanding how sentient beings interact with the world.
Understanding the Blind Spot and Vision
Saccadic eye movements help point our phobia, the crucial area of visual acuity, to what we want to see. Objects outside the phobia range appear fuzzy, making effective recognition challenging. The blind spot, as significant as the entire phobia, poses the risk of overlooking objects hit by its light due to the lack of registration. The brain completes the visual representation over the blind spot, ensuring the ability to look and reach objects across the visual field.
Boundary Completion and Surface Filling In
The brain employs boundary completion and surface filling in to create a complete image. Boundaries and surfaces are foundational mechanisms of vision, where all perceived objects are defined by boundaries or surfaces. Surfaces are filled in to account for varying levels of illumination across the visual field, ensuring a coherent perception despite diverse lighting conditions. The brain's hierarchical resolution of uncertainty involves multiple stages of processing to transition from incomplete to complete visual representations.
Resonance in Completing Surface Representations
A completed surface representation is determined to be sufficient for conscious visibility through a resonance connection between brain processing stages. The resonance between visual area V4 and the posterior parietal cortex determines the completeness of surface representation, facilitating conscious seeing and reaching actions. The posterior parietal cortex plays a crucial role in spatial attention and controlling visual and motor actions. The interaction between different brain regions helps in selecting complete surface representations for conscious perception and action.
Dr. Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical psychologist, neuroscientists and mathematician who, with Gail Carpenter, is the originator of Adaptive Resonance Theory - an explanation of how we learn without catastrophic forgetting. It also happens to be a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. We discuss the problem of catastrophic forgetting, the ways that resonant states lead to consciousness, the AI cliques that have taken over the industry, and why AGI is impossible under current design parameters. Check out his book, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: https://amzn.to/3PshWnc00:00:00 Go! 00:00:17 Who is Steve Grossberg? 00:12:19 Patreon Ask 00:14:44 Learning without Catastrophic forgetting 00:22:26 Bottom Up vs Top Down Systems 00:26:07 Integrating Adaptive Resonance Into Existing Systems 00:30:01 The AI Clique 00:40:03 Gated Steepest Descent: A model for learning 00:54:21 Plagiarism and Progress 01:06:25 Pitfalls of Finite Markovian Chain Models 01:12:44 The Rockefeller University Years 01:26:30 BREAK 01:26:45 Cracking the Hard Problem 01:34:18 Why we have to be conscious 01:41:01 How representations become sufficient 01:51:31 Not All Resonances are Conscious 01:55:24 The Relief System 02:01:47 Steelmanning the hard problem 02:10:18 Integrating flawed ideas 02:13:12 The Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness 02:17:29 On the Nature of Qualia 02:21:33 Information is a Vacuous Term 02:25:27 Evolution from Primitive to Complex 02:30:31 Putting ART in Evolutionary Terms 02:33:33 Learning Language Meanings 02:35:25 ChatGPT is a lookup table 02:39:39 Closing Thoughts Support the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB Support Dr. Grossberg by buying his book, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: https://amzn.to/3PshWnc Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub#consciousness #mind #resonance Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience AND our material science investigations of atomics, @MaterialAtomics https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics Join our mailing list https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities. - Blog: http://DemystifySci.com/blog - RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rss - Donate: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaD - Swag: https://bit.ly/2PXdC2y SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySci MUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671
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