Does Consciousness Exist?—In What Sense?

Abstract

This commentary on Barutta et al. (IPBS: Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science 44:2, 2010) elaborates the authors' ideas from a new angle. The following positions of the authors are presented and analyzed: emergetism, two different languages of the description of the phenomena, and the notion of "efficient causality". A different approach to the issue of mind-brain interaction is suggested. The key idea of the approach is based not on posing select characteristics which the mind, the brain, or the human consciousness is supposed to have, but on the description of the logic of the activity of this global system, and of the structures that make this characteristics possible to exist.

Opinion Dynamics with Confirmation Bias

“…Such (or similar) conditions are needed for features that are established for certain limiting values of the arguments of F (cf. (5,6)) to hold approximately whenever the arguments are close to those limiting values. F can also depend on model parameters, as seen below.…”

“…where µ quantifies the projection strength: for µ = 1 the projection is so strong that P does not change his opinion at all (conservatism), while for µ → 0, P fully accepts p (provided that p k > 0 for all k). (The above commutativity is formally valid also for µ ≤ 0 or µ > 1, but both these cases are in conflict with (5).) In particular, ǫ → 0 and µ → 0 is a limiting case of a fully credulous agent that blindly follows persuasion provided that all his probabilities are non-zero.…”

“…Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or process new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids contradiction with prior beliefs [52]. Various manifestations of this bias have been reported in cognitive psychology [5,67], social psychology [24,54], politics [46] and (media) economics [31,51,57,73]. Recent evidence suggests that scientific practices too are susceptible to various forms of confirmation bias [12,38,43,44,52], even though the imperative of avoiding precisely this bias is frequently presented as one of the pillars of the scientific method.…”

How to tell a wife from a hat: Affective feedback in perceptual categorization

“…Von Helmholtz (1866) suggested that perception is guided by unconscious inferences, Bruner (1957) and Gregory (1997) used the notion of perceptual hypotheses, and currently this idea recurs in predictive coding models (Friston, 2010;Hohwy, 2012Hohwy, , 2013. A recent proposal is that at each level of processing affective feedback reinforces the development of a realistic model of the world (Allakhverdov & Gershkovich, 2010;Chetverikov, 2014;Chetverikov, Jóhannesson, & Kristjánsson, 2014). This approach, coined as the affective feedback account of hypotheses testing, suggests that at each level of processing our cognitive system tries to predict what our environment is.…”

Untitled

“…He describes an insight phenomenon as a part of the general framework of consciousness. According to the framework, there are parallel cognitive modules (cognition loops) in unconsciousness that process information differently (Allakhverdov et al, 2015;Allakhverdov & Gershkovich, 2010). The researcher emphasizes the necessity for these loops to be independent to compare their outputs.…”