Expanding (credit: Sean Gladwell)
Understanding how consciousness arises from specific compositions of organic matter is a long-standing quest of scientists and philosophers. As AI systems now operate in ways that appear surprisingly conscious, it is more important than ever to understand who and what is available to experience life on a conscious level.As Christoph Koch writes then I am the world myself“The fact that you know very well how life feels is a cruel fact to which the world demands an explanation.” The explanation is what he eloquently tries to convey.
Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career searching for the seat of consciousness, probing the brain for the physical footprints of subjective experience. Ta. Researchers found that the posterior hot zone, a region at the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and the experience of sound, vision, and touch. The dense network of neocortical neurons in this region are connected in a loop-like configuration. The output signal is fed back to the input neuron, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And here, Koch argues, lies the key to consciousness.
in the hot zone
According to Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Koch is a stronger advocate of this theory than many competing theories of consciousness. The Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability to influence the system itself. This means using the past state of the system to influence the current state and that system. Current state can affect future state.
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