Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood? The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a ...
Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational functionalism, which treats cognition as something you can fully explain ...
For centuries, people have wondered what separates being awake from being asleep, dreaming, or unconscious. Scientists have ...
Research has revealed fascinating insights into how consciousness might emerge from quantum processes within the brain. Scientists have identified that microtubules, microscopic hollow tubes found ...
When René Descartes watched a mechanical figure move with lifelike precision in the 17th century, the scene unsettled him. The machine behaved like a person, yet no one believed it could feel. That ...
Neuropsychology researchers at LMU have discovered a rhythm in the midbrain that could serve as a bio-physiological signature for specific states of consciousness. The thalamus is a deep-lying ...
It is therefore easy to think that consciousness evolved to benefit us as individuals. But we have argued that consciousness may have evolved to facilitate key social adaptive functions. Rather than ...
In conventional computing, we can draw a clean line between software and hardware. In brains, there is no such separation of different scales. In the brain, everything influences everything else, from ...
People have long pondered what consciousness actually is. Consciousness seems very different from other biological functions—like some sort of nonmaterial essence within our heads. Thoughts and ...
In the interview with author Meghan O’Gieblyn (“The line between human and machine begins to blur,” Ideas, Oct. 10), she makes this observation: “I think the question of what’s conscious and what’s ...
Why does consciousness exist? The answer lies in the evolutionary origins of the simplest forms of subjective experience, not in studies of human consciousness alone, which represent just one special ...
Some results have been hidden because they may be inaccessible to you
Show inaccessible results