Topic: subjective experiences

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

The brain represents the external world through the bottleneck of sensory organs. The network of hierarchically organized neurons is thought to recover the causes of sensory inputs to reconstruct the reality in the brain in idiosyncratic ways depending on individuals and their internal states. How can we understand the world model represented in an individual’s brain, or the neuroverse? My lab has been working on brain decoding of visual perception and subjective experiences such as imagery and dreaming using machine learning and deep neural network representations. In this talk, I will outlin

The cognitive neuroscience of conscious perception has seen considerable growth over the past few decades. Confirming an influential hypothesis driven by earlier studies of neuropsychological patients, we have found that the lateral and polar prefrontal cortices play important causal roles in the generation of subjective experiences. However, this basic empirical finding has been hotly contested by researchers with different theoretical commitments, and the differences are at times difficult to resolve. To address the controversies, I suggest one alternative venue may be to look for clinical a