Cogprints
Login | Create Account

Amplifying Phenomenal Information: Toward a Fundamental Theory of Consciousness

Gabora, Liane (1999) Amplifying Phenomenal Information: Toward a Fundamental Theory of Consciousness. [Journal (Paginated)]

This is the latest version of this eprint.

Full text available as:

[img]HTML
110Kb

Abstract

Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a phenomenal aspect. How then do you get from phenomenal information to human consciousness? This paper proposes that an entity is conscious to the extent it amplifies information, first by trapping and integrating it through closure, and second by maintaining dynamics at the edge of chaos through simultaneous processes of divergence and convergence. The origin of life through autocatalytic closure, and the origin of an interconnected worldview through conceptual closure, induced phase transitions in the degree to which information, and thus consciousness, is locally amplified. Divergence and convergence of cognitive information may involve phenomena observed in light e.g. focusing, interference, and resonance. By making information flow inward-biased, closure shields us from external consciousness; thus the paucity of consciousness may be an illusion.

Item Type:Journal (Paginated)
Keywords:abstract thought, amplification, closure, combination problem, concept, consciousness, context, double aspect theory, edge of chaos, episodic mind, focus, holographic memory, information, interference, light, modern mind, origin of life, panpsychism, phase transition, quantum mechanics, resonance, superposition, symbolic threshold.
Subjects:Computer Science > Dynamical Systems
Neuroscience > Neural Modelling
Biology > Animal Cognition
Computer Science > Complexity Theory
Psychology > Cognitive Psychology
Philosophy > Philosophy of Mind
ID Code:2547
Deposited By:Gabora, Dr. Liane
Deposited On:22 Oct 2002
Last Modified:12 Sep 2007 17:45

Available Versions of this Item

References in Article

Select the SEEK icon to attempt to find the referenced article. If it does not appear to be in cogprints you will be forwarded to the paracite service. Poorly formated references will probably not work.

Abeles, M. and Bergman, H. (1993), ‘Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys’, Journal of Neurophysiology (4), pp. 1629-1638.

Aerts, D., & Aerts, S. (1997), ‘Application of Quantum Statistics in Psychological Studies of Decision Processes’, in Topics in the Foundation of Statistics, ed. B. Van Fraassen (Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic).

Aiello, L.C. (1996), ‘Hominine preadaptations for language and cognition’,in: Modeling the early human mind, ed. P. Mellars & K. Gibson, McDonald, pp. 80-99.

Aiello, L. and Dunbar, R. (1993), ‘Neocortex size, group size, and the evolution of language’, Current Anthropology 34 , pp. 184-193.

Alkon, D.L. (1989), ‘Memory storage and neural systems’, Scientific American, July, pp. 26-34.

Barron, F. (1963), Creativity and Psychological Health (Van Nostrand).

Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler).

Bickerton, D. (1990), Language and Species (Chicago: Chicago University Press).

Bickerton, D. (1995), Language and Human Behavior (London: UCL Press).

Boden, M. A. (1990/1992), The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, revised edition, Cardinal).

Bohm, D. (1980), Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Campbell, F. W. and Robson, J. G. (1968), ‘Application of Fourier analysis to the visibility of gratings’, Journal of Physiology , 197, pp. 551-566.

Cariani, P. (1995), ‘As if time really mattered: temporal strategies for neural coding of sensory information’, in Origins: Brain and self-organization, ed. K. Pribram (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), pp. 161-229.

Cariani, P. (1997), ‘Temporal coding of sensory information’, in Computational neuroscience: Trends in research 1997, ed. J.M. Bower (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Plenum), pp. 591-598.

Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1999), The Origins of Complex Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Chalmers, D. (1996), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Cemin, S. C. and Smolin, L. (1997), ‘Coevolution of membranes and channels: A possible step in the origin of life’, Journal of Theoretical Biology (October issue) [adap-org/9709004].

Combs, A. (1996), The Radiance of Being (St. Paul MN: Paragon House).

Dartnell, T. (1993), ‘Artificial intelligence and creativity: An introduction’, Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Intelligence Quarterly85.

Davidson, I. (1991), ‘The archeology of language origins: A review’, Antiquity65, pp. 39-48.

Deacon, T. W. (1997) The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (W.W. Norton & Company).

De Duve, C. (1995), Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative (New York: Basic Books).

Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company).

De Valois, R. L. and De Valois, K. K. (1988), Spatial Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Donald, M. (1991), Origins of the Modern Mind (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).

Donald, M. (2001), A Mind so Rare (New York: Norton Press).

Dunbar, R. (1993), ‘ Coevolution of neocortical size, group size, and language in humans ’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences16(4), pp. 681-735.

Dunbar, R. (1996), Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Faber & Faber).

Dyson, F. (1979), Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row).

Edelman, G.M. (1987), Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group (New York: Basic Books).

Edelman, G.M. (1992), Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (New York: Basic Books).

Edelman, G.M. and Tononi, G. (2000), A Universe of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books).

Emmers, R. (1981), Pain: A Spike-Interval Coded Message in the Brain (Philadelphia: Raven Press).

Erdos, P. and Renyi, A. (1959), On the Random Graphs 1(6), Institute of Mathematics, University of Debrecenians, Debrecar, Hungary.

Erdos, P. and Renyi, A. (1960), On the Evolution of Random Graphs. Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Publication 5.

Eysenck, H.J. (1995), Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press).

Farmer, J.D. Kauffman, S.A. and Packard, N.H. (1987), ‘Autocatalytic replication of polymers’, Physica D22(50).

Feigl, H. (1958/1979), ‘The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science2 pp. 370-497 (Reprinted by University of Minnesota Press).

Feist, G.J. (1999), ‘The influence of personality on artistic and scientific creativity’, in Handbook of Creativity, ed. R. J. Sternberg, (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 273-296.

Feldman, J.A. and Ballard, D.H. (1982), ‘Connectionist models and their properties’, Cognitive Science 6, pp. 205-254.

Fodor, E.M. (1995), ‘Subclinical manifestations of psychosis-proneness, ego-strength, and creativity’, Personality and Individual Differences , 18, pp. 635-642.

Foster, J. (1989), ‘A defense of dualism’, in The Case for Dualism, eds. J. Smith & J. Beloff (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press).

Gabora, L. (1998), ‘ Autocatalytic closure in a cognitive system: A tentative scenario for the origin of culture ’, Psycholoquy 9(67).

Gabora, L. (2000), ‘Conceptual Closure: Weaving Memories into an Interconnected Worldview’, in Closure: Emergent Organizations and their Dynamics , eds. G. Van de Vijver & J. Chandler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 901, pp. 42-53.

Gabora, L. (2002), ‘ Cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process ’, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creativity and Cognition, October 13-16, Loughborough University, UK.

Gabora, L. ‘ Origin of the modern mind through conceptual closure ’, submitted.

Gabora, L. (in press) ‘Cultural entities are not replicators but autocatalytic networks of them are’, to appear in Biology and Philosophy .

Gabora, L. and Aerts, D. (2002a), ‘ Contextualizing concepts ’, Proceedings of the 15th International FLAIRS Conference, Pensacola Florida, May 14-17, sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, pp. 148-152 .

Gabora, L. & Aerts, D. (2002b), ‘ Contextualizing concepts using a mathematical generalization of the quantum formalism ’, invited to appear in special issue of Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence on 'Categorization and Concept Representation: Models and Implications'.

Ghose, A. and Aurobindo, S. (1998), Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching & Method of Practice (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press).

Goertzel, B. (1993), The Structure of Intelligence (Berlin: Springer-Verlag).

Goertzel, B. (1993), The Evolving Mind (London: Gordon and Breach).

Goertzel, B. (1995), ‘ Chance and consciousness ’, Dynamical Psychology.

Griffin, D.R. (1998), Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Hancock, P. J. B., Smith, L. S. and Phillips, W. A. (1991), ‘A biologically supported error-correcting learning rule’, Neural Computation , 3 (2), pp. 201-212.

Hartshorne, C. (1968), Beyond Humanism: Essays on the Philosophy of Nature (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press).

Hebb, D.O. (1949), The Organization of Behavior (New York: Wiley).

Hinton, G. E. (1990), ‘Implementing semantic networks in parallel hardware’, in Parallel Models of Associative Memory , ed. G.E. Hinton & J.A. Anderson, (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) pp. 161-187.

Holden, S. B. & Niranjan, M. (1997), ‘Average-case learning curves for radial basis function networks’, Neural Computation , 9 (2), pp. 441-460.

Hopfield, J.J. (1982), ‘Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences79, pp. 2554-2558.

Hopfield, J.J., Feinstein, D.L. and Palmer, R.G. (1983), ‘Unlearning" has a stabilizing effect in collective memories’, Nature 304, pp. 158-159.

James, W. (1890/1950), The Principles of Psychology (Dover: New York).

Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983), Mental Models (Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA).

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992), Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).

Kauffman, S.A. (1993), Origins of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Kauffman, S.A. (1999), ‘ Darwinism, neoDarwinism, and the autocatalytic model of culture: Commentary on Origin of Culture ’, Psycoloquy10 (22).

Kurak, M. (2001), ‘Buddhism and brain science’, Journal of Consciousness Studies8 (11), pp. 17-26.

Landfield, P.W. (1976), ‘Synchronous EEG rhythms: Their nature and their possible functions in memory, information transmission and behavior’, in Molecular and Functional Neurobiology, ed. E.H. Gispen (New York: Elsevier).

Langton, C.G. (1992), ‘Life at the edge of chaos’, in Artificial life II, ed. C. G. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer & S. Rasmussen (Boston: Addison-Wesley).

Lestienne, R. (1996), ‘Determination of the precision of spike timing in the visual cortex of anesthetized cats’, Biology and Cybernetics, 74, pp. 55-61.

Lestienne, R. amd Strehler, B.L. (1987), ‘Time structure and stimulus dependence of precise replicating patterns present in monkey cortical neuron spike trains’, Neuroscience, April issue.

Lockwood, M. (1989), Mind, Brain, and the Quantum (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Lu, Y.W., Sundararajan, N. and Saratchandran, P. (1997), ‘A sequential learning scheme for function approximation using minimal radial basis function neural networks’, Neural Computation, 9 (2), pp. 461-478.

Mackay, D.M. (1986), ‘Vision - the capture of optical covariation’, in Visual Neuroscience, ed. J.D. Pettigrew, K.J. Sanderson and W.R. Levick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Marr, D. (1969), ‘A theory of the cerebellar cortex’, Journal of Physiology 202, pp. 437-470.

Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1987), The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala).

Maynard-Smith, J. and Szathmary, E. (1994), The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Metzinger, T. (1995), ‘Faster than thought: Holism, homogeneity, and temporal coding’, in Conscious Experience, ed. T. Metzinger (Thorverton, U.K.: Schoningh / Academic Imprint).

Mishkin, M. and Appenzeller, T. (1987), ‘The anatomy of memory’, Scientific American, June, pp. 62-71.

Mithen, S. (1996), The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science, and Religion (London: Thames & Hudson).

Montero, B. (2001), ‘Post-physicalism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies8 (2), pp. 61-80.

Morowitz, H. (1992), The Beginnings of Cellular Life , (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Mountcastle, V. (1993), ‘Temporal order determinants in a somatosthetic frequency discrimination: Sequential order coding’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 682, pp. 151-170.

Nagel, T. (1979), Mortal Questions (Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press).

Neisser, U. (1963), ‘The multiplicity of thought’, British Journal of Psychology, 54, pp. 1-14.

O’keefe, J. (1986), ‘Is consciousness the gateway to the hippocampal cognitive map? A speculative essay on the neural basis of mind’, Brain and Mind, 10, pp. 573-590.

Oparin, A.I. (1971), ‘Routes for the Origin of the First Forms of Life’, Subcellular and Cellular Biochemistry1 (75).

Orsucci, F. (1998), The Complex Matters of the Mind (Singapore: World Scientific).

Perkell, D. H. and Bullock, T. H. (1968), ‘Neural coding’, Neurosciences Research Program Bulletin6 (3), pp. 221-348.

Piaget, J. (1926), The Language and Thought of the Child (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Pribram, K.H. (1991), Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figureal Processing (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).

Pribram, K.H. (1997), ‘The deep and surface structure of memory and conscious learning: Toward a 21st Century Model’, in Mind and Brain Sciences in the 21st Century , ed. R.L. Solso (Boston: MIT Press), pp. 127-156.

Pribram, K. and Bradley, R. (1998), ‘The brain, the me, and the I’, In (M. Ferrari and R. Sternberg, Eds.) Self-awareness: Its Nature and Development. (New York: Guilford Press), pp. 273-307.

Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984), Order out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books).

Psaltis, D. and Mok, F. (1995), ‘Holographic memories’. Scientific American, 273 (5), pp. 70-76.

Richards, R.L., Kinney, D.K., Lunde, I., Benet, M., & Merzel, A. (1988), ‘Creativity in manic depressives, cyclothymes, their normal relatives, and control subjects’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology97 , pp. 281-289.

Riecke, F. and Warland, D. (1997), Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Rips, L.J. (2001), Necessity and natural categories. Psychological Bulletin127 (6), pp. 827-852.

Rosch, E. 'Principles of categorization', in Cognition and Categorization , ed. E. Rosch and B.B. Lloyd, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).

Russell, B. (1926), The Analysis of Matter (London: Kegan Paul).

Seager, W. (1995), ‘Consciousness, information, and panpsychism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies2 (3), pp. 272-288.

Shannon, C.E. (1948), ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, Bell Systems Technical Journal 27, 379-423. Reprinted in C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press).

Sincerbox, G. (1999), ‘Holographic storage: Are we there yet?’, Unpublished document. http://www.optics.arizona.edu/Glenn/holograp1.htm

Sloman, S. (1996), ‘The empirical case for two systems of Reasoning’, Psychological Bulletin9 (1) pp. 3-22.

Sporns, O., Gally, J.A., Reeke, G.N. Jr. and Edelman, G.M. (1989), ‘Reentrant signalling among simulated neuronal groups leads to coherency in their oscillatory activity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA86, pp. 7265-7269.

Sporns, O., Tonini, G., and Edelman, G.M. (1991), ‘Modeling perceptual grouping and figure-ground segregation by means of active reentrant connections’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 88, pp. 129-133.

Stoljar, D. (2001), ‘Two conceptions of the physical’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research62, pp. 253-281.

Strawson, G. (2000), ‘Realistic materialist monism’, in Toward a Science of Consciousness III ed. S. Hameroff, A. Kasniak, & D. Chalmers (Camdrige MA: MIT Press).

Stumpf, C. (1965), ‘Drug action on the electrical activity of the hippocampus’, International Review of Neurobiology 8 , pp. 77-138.

Taylor, K. (2001), ‘Applying continuous modelling to consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies8 (2) pp. 45-60.

Von der Malsburg, C. (1986), ‘Am I thinking assemblies?’, in Proceedings of the 1984 Trieste Meeting on Brain Theory, ed. G. Palm & A. Aertsen (Berlin: Springer-Verlag).

Waldman, G. (1983), Introduction to Light: The Physics of Light, Vision, and Color (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall).

Weisberg, R. W. (1986), Creativity: Genius and Other Myths (New York: Freeman Press).

Whitehead, A.N. (1929), Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan).

Willshaw, D. and Dayan, P. (1990), ‘Optimal plasticity from matrix memories: What goes up must come down’, Neural Computation . 2 (1), pp. 85-93.

Wolken, J. (1986), Light and Life Processes (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold).

Zajonc, A. (1993), Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univ Press).

Metadata

Repository Staff Only: item control page

Cogprints is powered by EPrints 3 which is developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. More information and software credits.