Cognition seminars

Over the past thirty years or so, cognitive neuroscience has made spectacular progress understanding the biological mechanisms of consciousness. Consciousness science, as this field is now sometimes called, was not only inexistent thirty years ago, but its very name seemed like an oxymoron: how can there be a science of consciousness? And yet, despite this scepticism, we are now equipped with a rich set of sophisticated behavioural paradigms, with an impressive array of techniques making it possible to see the brain in action, and with an ever-growing collection of theories and speculations about the putative biological mechanisms through which information processing becomes conscious. This is all good and fine, even promising, but we also seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, or at least to have forgotten it in the crib: consciousness is not just mechanisms, it’s what it feels like. In other words, while we know thousands of informative studies about access-consciousness, we have little in the way of phenomenal consciousness. But that — what it feels like — is truly what “consciousness” is about. Understanding why it feels like something to be me and nothing (panpsychists notwithstanding) for a stone to be a stone is what the field has always been after. However, while it is relatively easy to study access-consciousness through the contrastive approach applied to reports, it is much less clear how to study phenomenology, its structure and its function. Here, I first overview work on what consciousness does (the "how"). Next, I ask what difference feeling things makes and what function phenomenology might play. I argue that subjective experience has intrinsic value and plays a functional role in everything that we do.

We can perceive aesthetic properties such as beauty and sublimity in artworks, environmental nature and even ordinary life. How about consciousness? Does consciousness have aesthetic properties? If so, what kind of aesthetic properties conscious experiences can have? If conscious experiences can have some kinds of aesthetic properties, how can we appreciate them? These questions constitute "Consciousness Aesthetics". In this talk, I will introduce consciousness aesthetics as a new field of aesthetics and discuss some of such questions.

In the science of consciousness, it’s often assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. I'll (1) argue that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, and (2) develop an analysis of degrees of consciousness. On my view, whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I'll also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees.

We are now clearly entering a new age in our relationship with machines. The power of AI natural language processors and image generators has rapidly exceeded the expectations of even those who developed them. Serious questions are now being asked about the extent to which machines could become — or perhaps already are — sentient or conscious. Do AI machines understand the instructions they are given and the answers they provide? In this talk I will consider the prospects for conscious machines, by which I mean machines that have feelings, know about their own existence, and about ours. I will suggest that the recent focus on information processing in models of consciousness, in which the brain is treated as a kind of digital computer, have mislead us about the nature of consciousness and how it is produced in biological systems. Treating the brain as an energy processing system is more likely to yield answers to these fundamental questions and help us understand how and when machines might become minds.

Suppose you are on your favorite touchscreen device consciously and deliberately deciding emails to read or delete. In other words, you are consciously and intentionally looking, tapping, and swiping. Now suppose that you are doing this while neuroscientists are recording your brain activity. Eventually, the neuroscientists are familiar enough with your brain activity and behavior that they run an experiment with subliminal cues which reveals that your looking, tapping, and swiping seem to be determined by a random switch in your brain. You are not aware of it, or its impact on your decisions or movements. Would these predictions undermine your sense of free will? Some have argued that it should. Although this inference from unreflective and/or random intention mechanisms to free will skepticism, may seem intuitive at first, there are already objections to it. So, even if this thought experiment is plausible, it may not actually undermine our sense of free will.

In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving human or superhuman level intelligence. In this talk, I will examine the validity and potential application of this seemingly intuitive link between consciousness and intelligence. I will do so by examining the cognitive abilities associated with three contemporary theories of conscious function: Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Information Generation Theory (IGT), and Attention Schema Theory (AST), and demonstrating that all three theories specifically relate conscious function to some aspect of domain-general intelligence in humans. With this insight, we will turn to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and find that, while still far from demonstrating general intelligence, many state-of-the-art deep learning methods have begun to incorporate key aspects of each of the three functional theories. Given this apparent trend, I will use the motivating example of mental time travel in humans to propose ways in which insights from each of the three theories may be combined into a unified model. I believe that doing so can enable the development of artificial agents which are not only more generally intelligent but are also consistent with multiple current theories of conscious function.

Theories of consciousness are commonly grouped into "first-order" and "higher-order" families. As conventional wisdom has it, many more animals are likely to be conscious if a first-order theory is correct. But two recent developments have put pressure on the first/higher-order distinction. One is the argument (from Shea and Frith) that an effective global workspace mechanism must involve a form of metacognition. The second is Lau's "perceptual reality monitoring" (PRM) theory, a member of the "higher-order" family in which conscious sensory content is not re-represented, only tagged with a temporal index and marked as reliable. I argue that the first/higher-order distinction has become so blurred that it is no longer particularly useful. Moreover, the conventional wisdom about animals should not be trusted. It could be, for example, that the distribution of PRM in the animal kingdom is wider than the distribution of global broadcasting.

Polaris Koi (Philosophy) and Jake Gavenas (Neuroscience) begin the seminar by arguing that agentive control is the key requirement for free will, drawing on folk-philosophy findings to support this claim (Gavenas et al., in prep). They explore how two executive control processes that functionally involve consciousness—inhibition and top-down control of attention—connect self-control and free will.

In this talk I will present an account of how an agent designed or evolved to be intelligent may come to enjoy subjective experiences. First, the agent is stipulated to be capable of (meta)representing subjective ‘qualitative’ sensory information, in the sense that it can easily assess how exactly similar a sensory signal is to all other possible sensory signals. This information is subjective in the sense that it concerns how the different stimuli can be distinguished by the agent itself, rather than how physically similar they are. For this to happen, sensory coding needs to satisfy sparsity and smoothness constraints, which are known to facilitate metacognition and generalization. Second, this qualitative information can under some specific circumstances acquire an ‘assertoric force’. This happens when a certain self-monitoring mechanism decides that the qualitative information reliably tracks the current state of the world, and informs a general symbolic reasoning system of this fact. I will argue that the having of subjective conscious experiences amounts to nothing more than having qualitative sensory information acquiring an assertoric status within one’s belief system. When this happens, the perceptual content presents itself as reflecting the state of the world right now, in ways that seem undeniably rational to the agent. At the same time, without effort, the agent also knows what the perceptual content is like, in terms of how subjectively similar it is to all other possible precepts. I will discuss the computational benefits of this architecture, for which consciousness might have arisen as a byproduct.

In the first part of this talk, I will briefly present the unfolding argument by Doerig et al. (2019) and the various replies in the philosophical and neuroscientific literature. In the second part of the talk, I will explore the ramifications that this debate has for the science of consciousness and its philosophy, with particular focus on these questions: (i) which type of explanation should a theory of consciousness provide? (ii) what is the evidential basis for theories of consciousness?

I will build from Niccolo's discussion of the Blockhead argument to argue that having an FeedForward Network (FN) responding like an recurrent network (RN) in a consciousness experiment is not enough to convince us the two are the same with regards to the posession of mental states and conscious experience. I will then argue that a robust functional equivalence between FFN and RN is akso not supported by the mathematical work on the Universal Approximator theorem, and is also unlikely to hold, as a conjecture, given data in cognitive neuroscience; I will argue that an equivalence of RN and FFN may only apply to static functions between input/output layers and not to the temporal patterns or to the network's reactions to structural perturbations. Finally, I review data indicating that consciousness has functional characteristics, such as a flexible control of behavior, and that cognitive/brain dynamics reveal interacting top-down and bottom-up processes, which are necessary for the mediation of such control processes.

Neuroscientific methods successfully account for a system’s functional properties, but leave out the subjective properties of the accompanying experience. According to IIT, phenomenology can be studied scientifically by unfolding the cause-effect structure specified by a system. To illustrate how, in this talk I compare two systems (a grid and a map) to show that they can be functionally equivalent in performing fixation, but only one can specify a cause-effect structure that accounts for the extendedness of phenomenal space.

It is generally agreed upon that qualities of conscious experience instantiate structural properties, usually called relations. They furnish a representation of qualities (or qualia, in fact) in terms of a mathematical space Q (rather than a set), which is crucial to both modelling and measuring of conscious experience." "What is usually disregarded is that “only such structural properties generalize across individuals” (Austen Clark), but that qualities themselves as differentiated by stimulus specifications, behavior or reports do not. We show that this implies that only the part of Q which is invariant with respect to the automorphism group has a well-defined referent, while individual elements do not. This poses a prima facie limitation of any theory or experiment that aims to address individual qualities. We show how mathematical theories of consciousness can overcome this limitation via symmetry groups and group actions, making accessible to science what is properly called private language.

In this talk, I shall not argue for any single thesis or theory in the realm of the (un)consciousness and (in)attention. Instead I will discuss specific examples where philosophers and psychologists can have genuine collaborations in this area. Since issues concerning phenomenological overflow is already too familiar for this audience, I will briefly discuss it only, and focus on other issues that have not been overworked. The exact contents are to be determined, but I will perhaps focus on recent controversies over “sustained representation of perspectival shape” (Morales, Bax, and Firestone, 2020, 2021).

In this talk he will present current work in progress on “irruption theory”, a new theory of consciousness that integrates an embodied-enactive account of basic mind with radical formulations of the freedom and efficacy of intentional agency.

Tom Froese is Assistant Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), where he heads the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit. He is a cognitive scientist with a background in phenomenological philosophy, human-computer interaction, and complex systems theory. His interdisciplinary research centers on the role of agent-environment interaction in shaping cognition and consciousness, specifically when the interaction process involves sociality and technology. In this talk he will present current work in progress on “irruption theory”, a new theory of consciousness that integrates an embodied-enactive account of basic mind with radical formulations of the freedom and efficacy of intentional agency.

Integrated information theory (IIT) takes as its starting point phenomenology, rather than behavioral, functional, or neural correlates of consciousness. The theory characterizes the essential properties of phenomenal existence—which is immediate and indubitable. These are translated into physical properties, expressed operationally as cause-effect power, which must be satisfied by the neural substrate of consciousness. On this basis, the theory can account for clinical and experimental data about the presence and absence of consciousness. Current work aims at accounting for specific qualities of different experiences, such as spatial extendedness and the flow of time. Several implications of IIT have ethical relevance. One is that functional equivalence does not imply phenomenal equivalence—computers may one day be able to do everything we do, but they will not experience anything. Another is that we do have free will in the fundamental, metaphysical sense—we have true alternatives and we, not our neurons, are the true cause of our willed actions.

The COINTOB (conditional intention and integration to bound) model provides a heuristic framework of processes in Libet-style experiments. The model is based on three assumptions. First, brain activation preceding conscious intentions in Libet-style experiments does not reflect an unconscious decision but rather the unfolding of a decision process. Second, the time of conscious decision (W) reflects the moment in time when the decision boundary is crossed. This interpretation of W is consistent with our apparent intuition that we decide in the moment we experience the conscious intention to act. Third, the decision process is configured by conscious intentions that participants form at the beginning of the experiment based on the experimental instruction. Brass and Mele discuss the model, conceptual background for it, and the model’s bearing on free will.

Despite undeniable progress in the science of consciousness, there is no consensus on even fundamental theoretical and empirical questions, such as whether ‘phenomenal consciousness’ is a scientifically respectable concept, whether phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness, or whether the neural correlates of perceptual consciousness are in the front or in the back of the cerebral cortex. Notably, disagreement also concerns proposed theories of consciousness. However, since not all theories are mutually incompatible, there have been attempts to make theoretical progress by integrating or unifying them. I shall argue that this is preferable over proposing yet another theory, but that one should not expect it to yield a complete theory of consciousness. Rather, theoretical work in consciousness research should focus on core hypotheses about consciousness that different theories of consciousness have in common. Such a ‘minimal unifying model’ of consciousness can then be used as a basis for formulating more specific hypotheses about consciousness.