One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. John Barnden School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK I assume that [phenomenal] consciousness is a property physical processes can have, and that it involves pre-reflective auto-sensitivity (PRAS), which is related to the much-discussed pre-reflective self-consciousness [3,4]. I then argue that PRAS requires conscious processes to be directly and causally sensitive to their own inner causation as...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Pedro Mediano Department of Computing, Imperial College London In a seminal series of papers, Tononi, Sporns, and Edelman (TSE) introduced the idea that the neural dynamics underlying conscious states are characterised by a balance of integration and differentiation between system components. This idea remains prevalent in consciousness research today, influencing theoretical and experimental work. Such work has...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Inês Hipólito University of Wollongong Building on the modular architecture of mind (Fodor 1983), Modularity Networks is claimed as a theory well equipped to explain neural connectivity and reuse (Stanley et al.; 2019, Zerrili 2019). This paper takes the case of the oculomotor system to show that even if Modularity Network’s tools are useful to describe brain’s functional connectivity, they are limited in explaining...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Gustav Bernroider University of Salzburg, Dept. of Biosciences, Austria Are there knowable criteria for subjective entities such as conscious experience? I think there are, even physical ones. I advocate the view that the basic dualism between subject and object or mind and matter can be figured by an intuitively simple version of an inside out or inversion relation between two opposing physical domains. I propose a...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Marc Ebner Universität Greifswald, Germany The seemingly hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why subjective conscious experience exist. However, Qualia is nothing mysterious. Our subjective conscious experience is comparable across individuals because we are a product of evolution. It is grounded in reality and we use it to communicate with each other. Consciousness seems to be intertwined with...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Diana Stanciu University of Bucharest; Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) I will argue that epistemic structural realism (ESR) can offer a feasible theoretical framework for the study of consciousness and its associated neurophysiological phenomena. While structural realism has already been employed in physics or biology (cf. Tegmark 2007, Leng 2010, Ainsworth 2010, 2011, McArthur 2011,...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Aïda Elamrani Institut Jean Nicod, ENS The young field of consciousness science involves highly interdisciplinary research. For this reason, it is producing heterogeneous results which are hard to compare. This emerging discipline could benefit from a unifying, theory- neutral framework for analytical purposes. To this end, we must firstly identify a common ground between concurrent models. A brief scan through...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Chetan Prakash California State University, San Bernardino A scientific understanding of the process whereby physical entities produce consciousness has not come about, despite decades of investigation. This suggests exploring the reversal of the celebrated “hard problem of consciousness,” i.e., take consciousness as fundamental and the physical world as emergent. We describe D. Hoffman’s Interface Theory of...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Quanlong Wang Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford Natural science has a basic assumption that there exists a kind of objectivity in the world independent of any consciousness. But how could one verify such objectivity given the fact that human beings can only perceive any existence through their own consciousness? On the other hand, there is a possibility for the existence of pure consciousness which...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Pierre Baudot Median Technologies, Marseille, France. Elementary quantitative and qualitative aspects of consciousness are investigated conjointly from the biology, neuroscience, physic and mathematic point of view, by the mean of a theory written with Bennequin that derives and extends information theory within algebraic topology. Information structures, that accounts for statistical dependencies within n-body...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Paul Baird Université de Bretagne Atlantique I will present a mathematical model which encapsulates 3D perception from planar 2D data: to a combinatorial graph, we associate its "geometric spectrum"; eigenstates then correspond to local realizations of the graph in Euclidean 3-space as "invariant" frameworks. In this way geometry emerges from the structure, rather than being imposed upon it. One may attempt to...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Mauro D’Ariano Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Pavia I will explore the possibility of drawing definite theoretical assertions about “awareness”, including possible experimental falsification. Awareness will be regarded as a manifestation of a special kind of “information”, and, as such, formalised as an operational probabilistic theory (OPT) [1]. Awareness would correspond to “the feeling of the...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Anita Mehta Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Oxford Short- and long-term memories are distinguished by their forgettability. Most of what we perceive and store is lost rather quickly to noise, as new sensations replace older ones, while some memories last for as long as we live. Synaptic dynamics is key to the process of memory storage; in this talk I will discuss a few approaches we have taken to this...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Ramón Guevara Erra Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (UMR 8002), CNRS and Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France It has been argued that consciousness could be an emergent property of large neuronal networks, associated to the integration of information in the brain. However, it is not yet clear how is consciousness related to the complexity of functional brain networks. Based on a statistical mechanics...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Michael Silberstein Department of Philosophy, Elizabethtown College; Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland We discuss the implications for the determinateness and intersubjective consistency of conscious experience in two gedanken experiments from quantum mechanics (QM). In particular, we discuss Wigner's friend and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment with a twist. These are both cases...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Yakov Kremnitzer Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford In this talk I will explore how quantum collapse models can be a key to understanding awareness. I will explain the mathematical structure of quantum collapse models and give an example where collapse is caused by a quantum version of integrated information (this is joint with Andre Ranchin). I will then look at the possibility of understanding awareness...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Adrian Kent Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge The scientific consensus is that, although many important details remain to be elaborated, Darwinian evolution can be understood in principle as a consequence of known physical laws. As William James first pointed out, the development of human consciousness, and in particular the fact that it appears to have evolutionarily...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Ian Durham Saint Anselm College Most discussions around the nature of free will center on whether or not it exists or can exist. Lost in this argument is the fact that we at least perceive that free will exists, whether or not it actually does. This is an important distinction. If we take an operational view of perceived free will, we can construct meaningful measures for analyzing ensembles of possible choices. I...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Peter Lloyd School of Computing, University of Kent There has been a recent resurgence of interest in mental monism as a theory of consciousness (Goldschmidt & Pearce 2017, Chalmers 2017, 2018), and Lloyd (2006, 2019) has defended a form of Berkeleyanism that aligns with Pearce (2014) and Schrödinger’s (1958) “physical construct”. Unlike theories that take the conscious mind to supervene on the brain, mental...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Tim Palmer Department of Physics, University of Oxford This talk is in two parts. In the first part, I suggest that creativity arises from a close synergy between two modes of neuronal operation (corresponding to Kahnemann’s Systems 1 and 2) where in the first, the limited amount of available energy to the brain is spread across large numbers of active neuronal networks, making them susceptible to noise; and in the...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Jonathan Mason Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford Over recent decades several complementary mathematical theories of consciousness have been put forward including Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory. In contrast to these, in this talk I present the theory of Expected Float Entropy minimisation (EFE minimisation) which is an attempt to explain how the brain...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Aaron Sloman School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK Most recent discussions of consciousness focus on a tiny subset of loosely characterized examples of human consciousness, ignoring evolutionary origins and transitions, the diversity of human and non-human phenomena, the variety of functions of consciousness, including consciousness of: possibilities for change, constraints on those possibilities,...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Pedro Resende Técnico Lisboa I present a mathematical definition of qualia from which a toy model of consciousness is derived, partly as an attempt to provide a mathematical formulation of the theory of qualia and concepts put forward by C.I. Lewis in 1929. This formulation is guided by the identification of basic principles that convey abstract aspects of the behavior of physical devices that “detect” qualia, such as...

One in a series of talks from the 2019 Models of Consciousness conference. Peter Grindrod (joint research with Christopher Lester) Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford We seek to model the human cortex with 1B to 10B neurones arranged in a directed and highly modular network (a network of networks); with the tightly coupled modules (each containing 10,000 neurones or so) representing the cortical “columns”. Each neurone has an excitable and refectory dynamic and the...