arXiv Preprint Archive
March 13, 2021
K. Schmidt, J. Culbertson, C. Cox et al.
A new theory proposes that consciousness arises from representational affordances grounded in qualia, the basic units of conscious experience. The theory integrates neuroscience to guide the development of artificially conscious computing by balancing simulation, situatedness, and structural coherence in representations. Representations that achieve a suitable mix of situated and structurally coherent simulation-based qualia are hypothesized to give an agent the flexibility needed to succeed in rapidly changing environments. The approach draws on converging evidence from neuroscientific and modeling experiments.
arXiv Preprint Archive
March 1, 2021
Natesh Ganesh
A simple model for quantifying philosophical vagueness is introduced. The model's implications are discussed, including conditions under which quantifying a vague concept like 'nifty' leads to pan-nifty-ism. The key insight is that frameworks for quantifying consciousness, such as Integrated Information Theory, imply forms of panpsychism because favorable structure is already implicitly encoded in the construction of the quantification metric.
arXiv Preprint Archive
February 4, 2021
Erik D. Fagerholm, Robert Leech, Steven Williams et al.
Ketamine rapidly reduces depressive symptoms in treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Using brain imaging and dynamic causal modeling, researchers analyzed neural excitation/inhibition interactions in the primary somatosensory cortex of 18 unmedicated patients and 18 healthy controls during a somatosensory task. Patients were scanned at baseline, 6-9 hours after ketamine infusion, and 6-9 hours after placebo. A shift in neural dynamics toward a stable region of the Poincaré diagram—requiring increased excitatory and inhibitory coupling—predicted symptom improvement specifically after ketamine, not placebo. This drug-specific neural shift may serve as a biomarker for treatment response.
arXiv Preprint Archive
January 29, 2021
D. Calvetti, B. Johnson, A. Pascarella et al.
Meditation practices like focused attention (Samatha) and open monitoring (Vipassana) produce distinct brain activity patterns detectable in real time. Using MEG data from experienced Buddhist monks, brain activity was mapped to regions of a standard atlas and analyzed via spectral analysis and linear discriminant analysis. The method successfully distinguished between meditative states and resting state with eyes closed. Key brain regions contributing to this separation include the cingulate cortex, insular cortex, and internal structures such as the accumbens, caudate, putamen, thalamus, and amygdalae. These findings align with earlier longitudinal studies reporting meditation-induced morphological changes, offering objective evidence beyond subjective self-reporting.
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 26, 2020
Vitor Manuel Dinis Pereira
Brain activity patterns reveal how consciousness emerges! Scientists discovered specific brain regions that light up differently when we're consciously aware of something versus when information is processed unconsciously. Using advanced signal analysis, researchers found unique electrical patterns in the occipital and left temporal brain areas that correlate with conscious experiences, advancing our understanding of how the brain creates awareness.
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 26, 2020
Vitor Manuel Dinis Pereira
There are no brain electrophysiological correlates of subjective experience, though occipital and left temporal correlates exist. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) involve instantaneous phase changes, producing transient infinite frequency peaks that cannot be captured by standard methods like Wavelet Transform or Fast Fourier Transform, which rely on convolution. This original research shows that Empirical Mode Decomposition with post-processing Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition and the Hilbert-Huang Transform can analyze these instantaneous phase changes and account for transient frequency peaks in ERP structure.
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 23, 2020
D. Rudrauf, G. Sergeant-Perthuis, O. Belli et al.
Consciousness may function as a global workspace that integrates multimodal information, monitors expectations, and guides action. Using the Projective Consciousness Model, which draws on projective geometry, the authors operationalize subjective perspective and show how it can account for an inverse distance law linking appraisal and distance. They develop a generative model of affective and epistemic drives based on subjective parameters like apparent object size, and extend it to implement Theory of Mind consistent with simulation theory. Simulations of artificial agents, grounded in psychological rationale, demonstrate how varying model parameters produce adaptive and maladaptive behaviors relevant to clinical and developmental psychology, including resilience, joint attention, false-belief exploitation, social anxiety avoidance, and restricted interests in autism. Agent behaviors were also demonstrated in a robotic context.
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 19, 2020
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Hernan Bocaccio, Ignacio Perez-Ipina et al.
Consciousness depends on brain activity that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Analyzing electrocorticography data from non-human primates during sleep and various anesthetics, and fMRI data from humans during deep sleep and propofol anesthesia, all states of reduced consciousness showed dynamics closer to equilibrium than conscious wakefulness. This was measured by entropy production and the curl of probability flux in phase space. Non-equilibrium macroscopic brain dynamics therefore serve as a robust signature of consciousness, offering a statistical mechanics approach to studying cognition and awareness.
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 14, 2020
Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano, Federico Faggin
A quantum-information-based panpsychism is proposed, where consciousness is a fundamental property of quantum information, and the experience of information by its supporting system solves the hard problem of consciousness. The internally experienced quantum state must be pure (ontic), while the externally predictable state is mixed (epistemic). Purity-preserving evolution, called atomic quantum operation, is probabilistic, and its outcome is interpreted as free will, which is unpredictable even in principle. This framework also addresses the combination problem of panpsychism. Short-term experience is accounted for by quantum state evolution, while long-term memory is classical and requires quantum-to-classical and classical-to-quantum transfers.
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 13, 2020
Danko D. Georgiev
Consciousness may originate from unobservable quantum information integrated in quantum brain states, rather than from classical neuronal activity alone. Classical physics cannot explain how inner conscious experiences arise from brain processes or how they influence behavior. Quantum theory offers a framework: unobservable quantum states (vectors describing what exists) and quantum observables (operators describing what can be measured) coexist in Hilbert space. Quantum no-go theorems constrain brain dynamics to physically admissible Hamiltonians. This view explains the privacy of conscious experience and places conscious processes at picosecond timescales of neural biomolecule conformational transitions. The observable brain is constructed from classical bits, limited by Holevo's theorem, obtained by measuring quantum brain observables. Thus quantum information theory distinguishes the unobservable mind from the observable brain, providing a physical foundation for consciousness research.
arXiv Preprint Archive
November 30, 2020
Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán, Martin Molina, Francisco M. Mendoza
An autonomous agent can benefit from a cognitive architecture inspired by conscious beings, using a global workspace that integrates information from subsystems like attention, memory, and inner feelings. In a large experiment set, agents with this architecture navigated environments with multiple independent magnitudes, adapting to find positions matching their preferences. The model incorporates mechanisms for selecting which magnitude to attend to, storing beliefs and past experiences, and controlling information flow. Results suggest that such a design improves the agent's ability to adapt and perform in complex environments.
arXiv Preprint Archive
November 22, 2020
Hana Saoud, Duco De Beus, Severine Eybrard et al.
Schizophrenia is considered a functional disconnection disorder with a possible neurodevelopmental origin, and the ventral subiculum (SUB) may be a key region affected. This study in adult rats examined how postnatal inactivation of the left SUB at day 8 alters dopamine responses to the NMDA receptor antagonist ketamine in the nucleus accumbens core. Ketamine produced larger increases in dopamine levels and locomotor activity in rats with inactivated SUB compared to controls. These results suggest that early disruption of the SUB enhances sensitivity to NMDA receptor blockade, providing insight into glutamatergic mechanisms in schizophrenia.
arXiv Preprint Archive
November 10, 2020
Mike Steel
A complete representation of one's own attention is impossible, because attention streams cannot be faithfully modeled. This mathematical proof, using classical topology, supports Attention Schema Theory's claim that the brain's representation of its own attention is necessarily incomplete. That incompleteness explains why humans cannot understand how their subjective awareness arises, a core aspect of the so-called hard problem of consciousness.
arXiv Preprint Archive
November 7, 2020
Zakaria Djebbara, Thomas Parr, Karl Friston
Perceptual experience of architecture arises from interactions between the body's sensory and motor systems and the built environment. Actions change perceived surroundings based on expectations shaped by bodily capabilities and architectural features. Affordances—the fit between body structure and movement possibilities in a space—underlie continuous sensory information gathering. This paper takes a first step toward understanding architectural design's role in perceptual experience at a neuronal level, proposing a framework that synthesizes computational neuroscience with architectural phenomenology into a computational neurophenomenology. The framework aims to guide future studies linking architecture and cognitive neuroscience.
arXiv Preprint Archive
October 21, 2020
Jahan N. Schad
A new theory of consciousness, grounded in the brain's computational operations, proposes that motor cortex activity plays a key role in relaying conscious experiences. The theory argues that existing frameworks like global workspace theory and integrated information theory, while influential, do not fully explain consciousness because they either focus narrowly on neural correlates of mental effort or assume experience as an intrinsic brain property without addressing its non-physical aspects. The present work claims its approach is consistent with known neuroscience findings and provides a fundamental basis for physicalism, while also addressing meta-level problems of consciousness. The theory offers a simple, straightforward account rooted in the brain's information processing.
arXiv Preprint Archive
October 12, 2020
Seung Suk Kang, Scott R. Sponheim, Kelvin O. Lim et al.
A randomized clinical trial compared mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) to present-centered group therapy in 98 veterans with PTSD. MBSR led to greater reductions in PTSD symptoms, increased spontaneous alpha brainwave power in posterior sites, stronger task-related frontal theta power, and enhanced frontal theta heartbeat-evoked brain responses. Only changes in frontal theta heartbeat-evoked responses mediated the treatment effect, with source-level analysis showing that theta changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insular cortex, and lateral prefrontal cortex predicted symptom improvement. The findings suggest that mindfulness meditation improves relaxation and attentional control, but enhanced interoceptive brain capacity appears to be the primary mechanism regulating emotional disturbances in PTSD.
arXiv Preprint Archive
September 29, 2020
Yunshu Du, Garrett Warnell, Assefaw Gebremedhin et al.
A new framework called Lucid Dreaming for Experience Replay (LiDER) refreshes past experiences in a replay buffer by having the agent revisit a past state and simulate new actions using its current policy. If the simulated experience is better than the original, it replaces the old memory. This approach improves data efficiency and performance in off-policy reinforcement learning. In tests on six Atari 2600 games, LiDER consistently outperformed the baseline actor-critic algorithm. The method is designed for easy integration into multi-worker RL algorithms that use experience replay.
arXiv Preprint Archive
September 28, 2020
Adrian Kent
Conscious observation may cause quantum wavefunction collapse, and recent proposals tie collapse to a single numerical measure of consciousness. Chalmers and McQueen argue that a single measure fails because it would allow superpositions of distinct conscious states with the same measure. This paper argues that their objection requires precise symmetry between brain states underlying different experiences—a condition unlikely for human observers. While artificial networks might exhibit such symmetry, any theory mapping network states to mind states, like integrated information theory, assigns identical mental states to isomorphic networks. Thus, familiar experiences like color perception or pain are not related by the needed symmetries, weakening the objection for biological cases.
arXiv Preprint Archive
August 12, 2020
Maryam Alimardani, Linda Kemmeren, Kazuki Okumura et al.
A robot assistant guided mindfulness meditation while recording brain activity via EEG. Two groups of people interacted with the robot, one group meditating and the other not. Unlike prior meditation studies, the robot-guided practice did not change frontal alpha or theta brain waves. However, the meditation group showed stronger right-sided occipital gamma activity, linked to sensory awareness and open monitoring. Participants reported improved mood after interacting with the robot, regardless of whether they meditated. The findings suggest EEG can detect mindful states during robot-guided meditation, but the brain changes may differ from traditional meditation. This is the first report of EEG changes during robot-guided mindfulness practice.
arXiv Preprint Archive
August 6, 2020
Rodrigo Cofré, Rubén Herzog, Pedro A. M. Mediano et al.
Altered states of consciousness, such as those experienced during dreaming or meditation, offer a way to study how large-scale brain activity relates to different subjective experiences. This paper advocates a research program that combines bottom-up generative models of whole-brain activity, based on known properties of neural tissue, with top-down signatures proposed by theories of consciousness. The authors define altered states, discuss relevant brain-activity signatures, and introduce whole-brain models to explore the mechanisms behind these states. They argue that systematically investigating altered states through bottom-up modeling can clarify the biophysical, informational, and dynamical foundations of consciousness.
arXiv Preprint Archive
July 31, 2020
Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Quanlong Wang, Ilyas Khan
Consciousness is treated as fundamental and characterized by other-dependence, meaning conscious processes are defined by their relations to one another. A mathematical framework using compact closed categories is introduced, where morphisms represent conscious processes composed of generators specified by their interrelations. This compositional model may help avoid the hard problem of consciousness and address the combination problem of conscious experiences.
arXiv Preprint Archive
July 16, 2020
Camile Bahi
Depression is the world's leading cause of disability, yet classical antidepressants offer limited relief. Ketamine and psychedelics have shown promise and received Breakthrough Therapy designation. Their precise mechanisms remain unclear, but shared features include promoting structural, functional, and behavioral plasticity and increasing Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) via mTOR activation. This review connects pharmacological pathways of 5-HT2AR agonists and NMDA antagonists to neurobiological and psychological responses. It suggests that BDNF-driven plasticity alters connectivity in high-level cognitive networks like the Default Mode Network, fostering lasting psychological flexibility. Verifying these hypotheses could guide development of safer antidepressants and biomarkers for treatment response.
arXiv Preprint Archive
June 16, 2020
Kai Lukoff, Ulrik Lyngs, Stefania Gueorguieva et al.
A review of 370 mindfulness apps on Google Play shows they primarily present mindfulness as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction. Interviews with 15 U.S. mindfulness teachers from therapeutic, Buddhist, and Yogic traditions reveal concern that this narrow framing neglects mindfulness's full potential. The teachers' experiences suggest design implications for linking apps with deeper contemplative practices, such as cultivating compassion. The findings emphasize the importance of coherence in design: the metaphors and mechanisms of a technology should align with the underlying principles it follows.
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 28, 2020
Natesh Ganesh
A formal model of generating experimental data and inferring conscious experiences, introduced by Kleiner and Hoel, suggests that many theories of consciousness are pre-falsified if inference reports are valid. This reply expands that model to distinguish different types of variation. Using examples from neural networks, state machines, and Turing machines, it proves that substitutions do not exist for a broad class of Level-1 functionalist theories, making them immune to the substitution argument and indicating that not all leading theories are fundamentally flawed.
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 25, 2020
U. J. Mohrhoff
Reality is relative to consciousness or experience, not a single mind-independent world. Drawing from QBism, Kant, Bohr, Schrödinger, the Upanishads, and Sri Aurobindo, the ontology proposes different poises of consciousness, including a universal consciousness where all individuals are aspects of one whole. This framework resolves philosophical issues in science arising from reifying instruments or calculational tools and from ignoring the human experiential context of science. It also addresses problems in the philosophy of mind, such as intentionality and Husserl's paradox of the mutual inclusion of self and world.