A Universe of Consciousness

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A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
Author Gerald Maurice Edelman
Giulio Tononi
LanguageEnglish
Subject Consciousness
Published2000
Publisher Basic Books
Publication placeUnited States
Pages274
ISBN 9780465013760

A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination is the title of a 2000 book by biologists Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi; [1] published in UK as Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. [2] This book, written with Giulio Tononi, is the culmination of a series of works by Gerald Edelman on the workings of the brain which include Neural Darwinism and Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.

Contents

Precis

It is divided into six sections: the first three cover existing work from philosophical, neurological and Darwinian perspectives. Part IV presents the novel thesis of the work: the Dynamic Core Hypothesis. The remaining two parts explore how it resolves various philosophical and practical issues.

The Background

Since Descartes, philosophers have been occupied with the concept of consciousness and its subjective nature has posed a special problem for science. Its nature arises from the neuronal structures in the brain and some understanding of these, together with the experimental tools needed to explore them, is given in the following chapters. They then recapitulate Edelman's still controversial theory of somatic selectionism during early development which controls the topology of a particular brain and enables restructuring in response to experience. They argue that memory is not a symbolic representation but a reflection of how the brain has changed its dynamics in order to achieve motor activity. This leads to a discussion of primary consciousness which integrates with perception into a means of directing immediate behavior and requires significant levels of reentrancy to achieve its effects.

The Dynamic Core Hypothesis

The problem of integrating, or binding, the activity of functionally segregated areas of the brain in order to concentrate attention on a particular activity in a short amount of time (typically 100-250 msecs) after the presentation of a stimulus is explored by means of large-scale simulations. It is shown that this can only happen if some elements interact more strongly among themselves than with the rest of the system including a large amount of reentrancy. These functional clusters are only slowly coming into the range of PET or fMRI scanning technology which commonly require much longer time scales.

At any given time, only a small subset of the neuronal groups in the brain are contributing directly to consciousness and this cluster is called a dynamic core. It represents a single point of view and each different state of consciousness corresponds to a different subset. Some dissociative disorders such as schizophrenia may result in the formation of multiple cores.

Implications of the hypothesis

One of the recurring issues in consciousness is the existence of qualia , such as redness, warmth and pain. It is not enough to identify each quale with a particular neuron or neuronal group; what is crucial is all the other groups which are highly influenced by the sensation and will fire at the same time. Thus each conscious state deserves to be called a quale. A small perturbation of a group of neurons can affect the whole in a very short space of time provided the system is kept in a state of readiness by the thalamus. Primary consciousness can build up a bodily based reference space even before language and higher-order consciousness appear.

There is a preliminary approach to the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes, including sensors and motors, because so little is known. The evolution of language centres in the brain leads to higher order consciousness which enhances subjective experience and enables humans to describe qualia which are however experienced by a much wider range of animals. Thinking in humans has a range of representations—including pictorial. In contrast to computers which are Turing machines, brains are based on neuronal group selection.

Reviews

John Cornwell (Sunday Times) One of the most thoughtful books on the topic... While revealing much that is surprising about consciousness, they confirm some deeply held convictions about the power and mystery of human imagination.

The results of this pioneering work challenge the conventional wisdom about consciousness. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neural Darwinism</span> Theory in neurology

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerald Edelman</span> American biologist

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Global workspace theory (GWT) is a framework for thinking about consciousness proposed by cognitive scientists Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s. It was developed to qualitatively explain a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. GWT has been influential in modeling consciousness and higher-order cognition as emerging from competition and integrated flows of information across widespread, parallel neural processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal consciousness</span> Quality or state of self-awareness within an animal

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giulio Tononi</span> Neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and professor

Giulio Tononi is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin. He is best known for his Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a mathematical theory of consciousness, which he has proposed since 2004.

Primary consciousness is a term the American biologist Gerald Edelman coined to describe the ability, found in humans and some animals, to integrate observed events with memory to create an awareness of the present and immediate past of the world around them. This form of consciousness is also sometimes called "sensory consciousness". Put another way, primary consciousness is the presence of various subjective sensory contents of consciousness such as sensations, perceptions, and mental images. For example, primary consciousness includes a person's experience of the blueness of the ocean, a bird's song, and the feeling of pain. Thus, primary consciousness refers to being mentally aware of things in the world in the present without any sense of past and future; it is composed of mental images bound to a time around the measurable present.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neural correlates of consciousness</span> Neuronal events sufficient for a specific conscious percept

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qualia</span> Instances of subjective experience

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Integrated information theory</span> Theory within consciousness research

Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes a mathematical model for the consciousness of a system. It comprises a framework ultimately intended to explain why some physical systems are conscious, and to be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree, and what particular experience it has; why they feel the particular way they do in particular states, and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious.

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Reentry is a neural structuring of the brain, which is characterized by the ongoing bidirectional exchange of signals along reciprocal axonal fibers linking two or more brain areas. It is hypothesized to allow for widely distributed groups of neurons to achieve integrated and synchronized firing, which is proposed to be a requirement for consciousness, as outlined by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi in their book A Universe of Consciousness.

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness.

References