consciousness

_Ssrn_. 2026An acceptable information-processing theory of consciousness should be able to identify the adaptive advantages that drove the emergence of consciousness during the evolution of life. It should also predict the specific dynamical architecture of information processing that would need to be instantiated in AI to produce consciousness and the superior adaptation it enables. Whether such…

The hard problem of consciousness asks why the performance of cognitive functions is accompanied by subjective experience. This article argues that the question can be reformulated as a computable dynamical problem: subjectivity generation requires a cost function on path space. I present the unified rate functional Icx—the Freidlin–Wentzell rate function of a physical path measure—as the central…

A new theory, published in The Journal of Neuroscience by three scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, offers an explanation of how the brain produces cognition and consciousness: It uses traveling waves of rhythmic neural activity to coordinate nimble neural networks with analog computations.

This is a secular, first-person account of a contemplative practice developed over more than thirty years of Zen meditation, written by a practitioner rather than a scholar. It draws together Charlotte Joko Beck's teaching on the core negative belief, Iain McGilchrist's account of hemispheric asymmetry, Douglas Hofstadter's notion of the strange loop, and neuroscientific research on the Default M…

If consciousness is a by-product of our brains’ nonconscious processes, where does that leave us?

There is a deeper side to the brain which weaves your memories, goals, beliefs and emotions into a continuous sense of self.