Hasil untuk "Consciousness. Cognition"

Vinod Menon

The discovery of the default mode network (DMN) has revolutionized our understanding of the workings of the human brain. Here, I review developments that led to the discovery of the DMN, offer a personal reflection, and consider how our ideas of DMN function have evolved over the past two decades. I summarize literature examining the role of the DMN in self-reference, social cognition, episodic and autobiographical memory, language and semantic memory, and mind wandering. I identify unifying themes and propose new perspectives on the DMN's role in human cognition. I argue that the DMN integrates and broadcasts memory, language, and semantic representations to create a coherent "internal narrative" reflecting our individual experiences. This narrative is central to the construction of a sense of self, shapes how we perceive ourselves and interact with others, may have ontogenetic origins in self-directed speech during childhood, and forms a vital component of human consciousness.

J. Panksepp

D. Chalmers

A. Baddeley

J. Hobson, E. Pace-Schott

B. Baars

B. Latour

Ira Wolfson

Artificial intelligence research faces a critical ethical paradox: determining whether AI systems are conscious requires experiments that may harm entities whose moral status remains uncertain. Recent work proposes avoiding consciousness-uncertain AI systems entirely, yet this faces practical limitations-we cannot guarantee such systems will not emerge. This paper addresses a gap in research ethics frameworks: how to conduct consciousness research on AI systems whose moral status cannot be definitively established. Existing graduated moral status frameworks assume consciousness has already been determined before assigning protections, creating a temporal ordering problem for consciousness detection research itself. Drawing from Talmudic scenario-based legal reasoning-developed for entities whose status cannot be definitively established-we propose a three-tier phenomenological assessment system combined with a five-category capacity framework (Agency, Capability, Knowledge, Ethics, Reasoning). The framework provides structured protection protocols based on observable behavioral indicators while consciousness status remains uncertain. We address three challenges: why suffering behaviors provide reliable consciousness markers, how to implement graduated consent without requiring consciousness certainty, and when potentially harmful research becomes ethically justifiable. The framework demonstrates how ancient legal wisdom combined with contemporary consciousness science can provide implementable guidance for ethics committees, offering testable protocols that ameliorate the consciousness detection paradox while establishing foundations for AI rights considerations.

Alexander Serov

This article proposes a research and development direction that would lead to the creation of next-generation intelligent technical systems. A distinctive feature of these systems is their ability to undergo evolutionary change. Cognitive architectures are now one of the most promising ways to create Artificial General Intelligence systems. One of the main problems of modern cognitive architectures is an excessively schematic approach to modeling the processes of cognitive activity. It does not allow the creation of a universal architecture that would be capable of reproducing higher nervous functions without using a predetermined set of perception patterns. Our paper proposes an evolutionary approach to creating a cognitive architecture. The basis of this approach is the use of a functional core, which consistently generates the intellectual functions of an autonomous agent. We are considering a cognitive architecture that includes components, the interaction of which ensures the evolution of the agent. The discussion of the development of intelligence is carried out using the conceptual apparatus of semiotics. This allows us to consider the task of developing cognitive functions as a problem of establishing a connection between the Merkwelt and the Werkwelt through the creation of the Innenwelt. The problem of early postnatal ontogenesis is investigated on the basis of the theory of constructivism: we discuss the requirements for the functional core and its composition, as well as the mechanism that initiates the process of cognition.

Chrisantha Fernando, Dylan Banarse, Simon Osindero

Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations -- mime, language, art -- to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access consciousness, the global availability of information for reasoning. Yet the bandwidth of access consciousness is tiny compared with the richness of `raw experience', so no external representation can reproduce that richness in full. Ordinarily an explanation of experience need only let an audience `grasp' the relevant pattern, not relive the phenomenon. But our drive to be understood, and our low level sensorimotor capacities for `grasping' so rich, that the demand for an explanation of the feel of experience cannot be ``satisfactory''. That inflated epistemic demand (the preeminence of our expectation that we could be perfectly understood by another or ourselves) rather than an irreducible metaphysical gulf -- keeps the hard problem of consciousness alive. But on the plus side, it seems we will simply never give up creating new ways to communicate and think about our experiences. In this view, to be consciously aware is to strive to have one's agency understood by oneself and others.

Mototaka Suzuki, Jaan Aru

Technological advances in the past decades have begun to enable neuroscientists to address fundamental questions about consciousness in an unprecedented way. Here we review remarkable recent progress in our understanding of cellular-level mechanisms of conscious processing in the brain. Of particular interest are the cortical pyramidal neurons -- or "psychic cells" called by Ramón y Cajal more than 100 years ago -- which have an intriguing cellular mechanism that accounts for selective disruption of feedback signaling in the brain upon anesthetic-induced loss of consciousness. Importantly, a particular class of metabotropic receptors distributed over the dendrites of pyramidal cells are highlighted as the key cellular mechanism. After all, Cajal's instinct over a century ago may turn out to be correct -- we may have just begun to understand whether and how psychic cells indeed generate and control our consciousness.

Alizée Vernouillet, Nanxi Huang, Debbie M. Kelly

Abstract When foraging, individuals often need to assess potential risk from competitors. Within many food-caching (food-storing) species, individuals can modify their caching behavior depending on whether other individuals are present during the caching event. During caching, individuals may interact with not only conspecifics but also heterospecifics. However, the extent to which individual cachers can discriminate between conspecifics and heterospecifics that present a pilfering threat or not, has received little attention. During this study, we examined this issue with food-storing birds, highly social pinyon jays and less social Clark’s nutcrackers. Cachers were given a choice to store their seeds in one of two visually distinct trays. Subsequently, one of the trays was given to an individual (either a conspecific or a heterospecific) who pilfered the caches, whereas the other tray was given to an individual (either a conspecific or a heterospecific) who did not pilfer the caches. When the two trays were returned to the cachers, they recached the seeds from the tray given to the pilfering observer individual more so than the tray given to the non-pilfering observer, but only when the pilferer was a conspecific. Our results suggest that the pinyon jays and nutcrackers could distinguish between conspecifics based on their pilfering behavior, but not between heterospecifics. Together, our results reconsider the ability of corvids to discriminate between individuals based on their pilfering risk and the importance of doing so while caching.

Juliana Patrícia Chaves de Almeida, Yu Kawai, Arnaldo Prata-Barbosa et al.

Pediatric delirium (PD) is an acute neuropsychiatric syndrome marked by fluctuating disturbances in attention and cognition, frequently observed in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) and associated with increased morbidity, mortality, and long-term cognitive impairment. Despite its clinical significance, PD remains underdiagnosed due to challenges inherent in assessing consciousness and cognition in children at varying developmental stages. Several bedside tools have been developed and validated in recent years, including the Cornell Assessment of Pediatric Delirium (CAPD), PreSchool Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit (psCAM-ICU); Pediatric Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit (pCAM-ICU), and Sophia Observation Withdrawal Symptoms—Pediatric Delirium Scale (SOS-PD), enhancing early recognition and management of PD in critically ill children. This narrative review explores the historical background, epidemiology, risk factors, pathophysiology, clinical subtypes, diagnostic tools, and current prevention and treatment strategies for PD from newborns to 21 years old. The screening tools available and the integration of non-pharmacological interventions, such as environmental modifications and family-centered care, as well as cautious and selective pharmacological management, are emphasized in this review. Early identification and targeted interventions are essential to mitigate the adverse outcomes associated with PD.

Schreier DR, Fecchio M, Guay CS et al.

David R Schreier,1– 4 Matteo Fecchio,3 Christian S Guay,1,2,5 Reid G Kovacs,1,6– 8 Mark Olchanyi,2,3,6 Ariel L Mueller,1 Timothy T Houle,1 Brian L Edlow,3,9 Emery N Brown,1,2,6,7 Ken Solt1 1Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Department of Anaesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 2Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; 3Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 4Department of Neurology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, and University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland; 5Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA; 6Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; 7Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; 8Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; 9Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USACorrespondence: David R Schreier, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA, 02114, USA, Email david.r.schreier@gmail.comPurpose: Dexmedetomidine (DEX) is a well-tolerated sedative drug that induces a sleep-like state. DEX sedation offers a model to study transitions between different states of consciousness (indicated by, eg, behavior, the electroencephalogram (EEG), or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) evoked EEG responses). However, the effects of repeated DEX exposure on recovery are poorly understood and will be investigated in this pilot study.Participants and Methods: We aim to enroll 12 healthy volunteers (6 females, 6 males). Although we do not expect TMS-EEG to interfere with DEX sedation, due to the paucity of evidence this study uses a parallel arm design (TMS-EEG, non-TMS-EEG). Participants will be sedated twice, one week apart, and responsiveness monitored by a click-task to auditory beeps. A 64-channel EEG and additional physiological signals will be recorded. Cognition and vigilance tests will be performed before sedation (baseline), after return of responsiveness (ROR), and before discharge. TMS-EEG will be performed at baseline, during sedation, and during recovery. Using a smartwatch and questionnaires, we will assess sleep quality, sleepiness, and experiences during sedation and TMS-EEG.Results: We will report the difference of time to ROR between the first and second study visit, and explore potential differences across sex and study arms. We will evaluate state transitions by comparing responsiveness, traditional EEG signatures, TMS-evoked EEG responses (ie, perturbational complexity index), and report on cognition and vigilance test performance.Conclusion: This pilot trial will report on the effect of repeated DEX exposure on the recovery period, and the investigation of state transitions will advance our scientific understanding of altered states of consciousness. REDEX will provide valuable insights and data for designing future DEX sedation studies. Moreover, we will report on the potential of biological sex as a confounding factor and the feasibility of TMS-EEG under DEX.Keywords: consciousness, sedation, sleep, electroencephalography, transcranial magnetic stimulation, target-controlled infusion

Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán

The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of phenomenal consciousness in that system as an epiphenomenon or as a consequence of the behavioral or internal complexity of the system surpassing some threshold. As a consequence, a huge amount of literature exploring the possibility of machine consciousness and how to implement it on a computer has been published. Moreover, common folk psychology and transhumanism literature has fed this hypothesis with the popularity of science fiction literature, where intelligent robots are usually antropomorphized and hence given phenomenal consciousness. However, in this work, we argue how these literature lacks scientific rigour, being impossible to falsify the opposite hypothesis, and illustrate a list of arguments that show how every approach that the machine consciousness literature has published depends on philosophical assumptions that cannot be proven by the scientific method. Concretely, we also show how phenomenal consciousness is not computable, independently on the complexity of the algorithm or model, cannot be objectively measured nor quantitatively defined and it is basically a phenomenon that is subjective and internal to the observer. Given all those arguments we end the work arguing why the idea of conscious machines is nowadays a myth of transhumanism and science fiction culture.

Shaoyang Cui, Shanglin Wu, Nikolai Madlener

Based on the former work Conscious Turing Machine, in this paper, we attempt to talk about the consciousness of CTM, dig deeper into the self-consciousness in CTM, offer a clear definition of it, and design a possible model of the Model-of-the-World processor. To prove the consciousness of CTM does exist, we chose two definitions of human consciousness and extracted four key points to see if the CTM framework meets with them. If it does, we affirm that it's more likely to be able to generate consciousness. About self-consciousness, our definition of it refers to both the definition of conscious awareness in CTM and former studies about the duality of self. After that, we give a brief introduction to a possible model of MoTW processors including five important parts: Modeling function, Gist function, Value function, Cache, and Long term memory. Finally, we use some illusions and disorders to explain our MotW processor model, trying to understand how these illusions work on a CTM.

Izak Tait, Joshua Bensemann, Ziqi Wang

GPT-4 is often heralded as a leading commercial AI offering, sparking debates over its potential as a steppingstone toward artificial general intelligence. But does it possess consciousness? This paper investigates this key question using the nine qualitative measurements of the Building Blocks theory. GPT-4's design, architecture and implementation are compared to each of the building blocks of consciousness to determine whether it has achieved the requisite milestones to be classified as conscious or, if not, how close to consciousness GPT-4 is. Our assessment is that, while GPT-4 in its native configuration is not currently conscious, current technological research and development is sufficient to modify GPT-4 to have all the building blocks of consciousness. Consequently, we argue that the emergence of a conscious AI model is plausible in the near term. The paper concludes with a comprehensive discussion of the ethical implications and societal ramifications of engineering conscious AI entities.

Antonela Blazekovic, Antonela Blazekovic, Kristina Gotovac Jercic et al.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a complex disorder that is influenced by multiple genetic risk factors. There is a significant heterogeneity in PD presentation, both pathologically and clinically. Some of the most common and important symptoms affecting the patient are cognitive impairment and dementia. However, the genetic and biological basis underlying the differences in cognitive profiles, including the development of dementia in PD, is not yet well understood. Understanding the role of genes in cognitive outcomes is crucial for effective patient counseling and treatment. Research on familial PD has discovered more than 20 genes that can cause the disease. The identified genes responsible for familial cases of PD are LRRK2, PARK7, PINK1, PRKN, or SNCA gene, although there may be other genes that also contribute. Additionally, some of these genes may also play a role in cases that were previously thought to be sporadic. Currently, numerous well-described genes increase the risk of cognitive decline in PD, each with varying levels of penetrance. The aim of this review is to identify the relevant genetic factors that contribute to differences in cognition. We discuss the genes that may affect cognition and the challenges in establishing a clear genetic diagnostic and prognostic assessment. This article aims to demonstrate the complexity of the genetic background of cognition in PD and to present the different types of genotype changes that can impact cognition through various neurobiological mechanisms.

Flavia Berlinghieri, Gabriele Rizzuto, Lara Kruizinga et al.