ringo.ring
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Conscious brain implants - 2010/04/27 11:58
Hi everyone,
Here the project about brain-machine interface that would unite machine & human consciousness into single one.
http://engineuring.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/consciousness-in-mixed-systems-merging-artificial-and-
biological-minds-via-brain-machine-interface/
That way, we cal really engineer our consciousness. Just synthesize phenomenological states your need in a chip, the connect it through special kind of BMI to your brain 
This would allow to test different theories about consciousness as it makes road from hypothesizing to practical implementation...
I'm interested in your feedback and thoughts... 
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Raúl
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/05/05 17:31
Hi, thanks for the pointer.
Interesting. When you say “device that is capable of conscious experiences – “qualia” – by itself”, I understand you mean that the device is capable of generating a signal (specification of experience) such that when it is interpreted by the brain through the BCI, the subject experiences the corresponding qualia. Isn’t it?
Actually, I think analogous effects can be achieved even without using BCI or BMI. Think about sensory substitution experiments (back in the 60’s by Bach-y-Rita). The nice potential of BMI is that in addition to substitute one modality for another (like visual for haptic in Bach-y-Rita’s experiments), you could presumably enhance human qualia space with new modalities.
What I don’t really see is why you claim the BMI would be conscious. Although I see you use quotation marks.. What do you really mean by “conscious” BMI?
Best,
Raúl.
Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul |
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ringo.ring
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/05/05 18:57
Hi!
Raúl wrote:
When you say “device that is capable of conscious experiences – “qualia” – by itself”, I understand you mean that the device is capable of generating a signal (specification of experience) such that when it is interpreted by the brain through the BCI, the subject experiences the corresponding qualia. Isn’t it?
No, actually what you describe is right opposite!
In your approach, you assign the actual task of creating qualia to the user's brain, although you instruct this brain carefully - by specially generated signals - what qualia it has to experience.
This is also interesting and would be more advanced than existing BCIs such as cochlear/retinal implants - signals they send to the brain encode only low-level information about outside world (such as frequencies). Potentially these signals could be preprocessed to contain some info about objects like in resulting qualia...
But this approach still puts too much impact on the brain, because it has to process these signals.
Raúl wrote:
What I don’t really see is why you claim the BMI would be conscious. Although I see you use quotation marks.. What do you really mean by “conscious” BMI?
The point is that the chip - brain implant - would have its own conscious experience. If chip is connected to i.e. camera then it would have phenomenal experiences of incoming pictures. Due to recent progress in machine consciousness / synthetic phenomenology this should be doable 
Then, this chip would be connected to the brain somehow that 2 phenomenal experiences - i.e. of chip & user - would be integrated to become single experience of the user. This is most though part of the project.
In Zeki's theory of microconsciousness terms, this would be similar to adding yet another node or several nodes:
internally created visual percepts illusions, afterimages, imagery, and hallucinations activate specifically the nodes specialized for the attribute perceived. Finally, anatomical evidence shows that there is no final integrator station in the brain, one which receives input from all visual areas; instead, each node has multiple outputs and no node is recipient only. Taken together, the above evidence leads us to propose that each node of a processing-perceptual system creates its own microconsciousness. We propose that, if any binding occurs to give us our integrated image of the visual world, it must be a binding between microconsciousnesses generated at different node
In this scheme, what is conscious is actually chip and user itself, but not actual BCI which connects them... that's why it is in quotes
Ok, write u mo a bit later!
Alexandra
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Raúl
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/05/23 11:01
Ok, I think I (almost) completely understand your approach now.
The thing that makes me remain critical about it is integration (in the sense of the IIT - Information Integration Theory of consciousness).
I must admit I'm not familiar with Zeki's microconsciousness hypothesis (what should I read first? "The disunity of consciousness"?).
I'll comment more on this once I know better what I'm talking about For the time being, from what you said in your post, I see the main hypothesis rests in the fact that - to make it short -there is no central place in the brain where consciousness is generated. Anyhow, that doesn't imply that some parts (say, the thalamocortical complex with its reentry processes, etc., etc.) are required to be involved in the generation of unified/integrated qualia.
In other words, the main problem I see is the integration of the information coming from the BCI. I don't say this is impossible. What I mean in that the generation of qualia should emerge globally from the complex brain-BCI-device. I wouldn't say that the BCI is conscious, I'd rather say that the whole system is conscious (which was the case already when the brain was alone). And then, I come back to the same point I argued in the my first post: this is like adding a prosthesis, but not adding phenomenal states... The point you raised is quite interesting though, I'd say you're trying to locate qualia somewhere, which maybe the issue here.
Anyhow, as I said, I need to read Leky's papers in order to provide a competent comment about this
Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul |
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ringo.ring
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/06/15 00:59
Hi Raul,
Zeky's approach is not that important - I do not depend on any particular theory of consciousness. It is just much easier to understand if start from Zeki's point of view.
I just explained "mind implants" in more details in my blog post 
http://engineuring.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/mind-implants-or-how-to-expand-consciousness-using-new-
technologies/
You're very welcome to comment!
Looking forward your thoughts,
Alexandra
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ringo.ring
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/06/17 02:24
Just re-read your post a have a bunch of comments to add
Raúl wrote:
The thing that makes me remain critical about it is integration (in the sense of the IIT - Information Integration Theory of
consciousness).
Actually, Tononi's theory of "Integration" gives some estimates about possible design of implant and its connection with brain.
Activity in different brain parts "produce" different qualia, but all these qualia somehow become integrated to form one single mind, not a bunch of separate mini-minds for each quale.
IIT proposes that for integration to happen, underlying neural circuitry should have the same integrated architecture, still sufficiently diferentiated however. The neatest point is that appropriateness of specific architecture can be estimated quantitatively.
Raúl wrote:
I must admit I'm not familiar with Zeki's microconsciousness hypothesis (what should I read first? "The disunity of consciousness"?).
I'm not that much too But from what I remember, his paper makes that point - that different brain parts "produce" different qualia, for example color & motion: if part responsible for motion is destroyed, it only affects only ability to experience motion.
Raúl wrote:
I'll comment more on this once I know better what I'm talking about For the time being, from what you said in your post, I see the main hypothesis rests in the fact that - to make it short -there is no central place in the brain where consciousness is generated.
I doubt that there is some central place. But if there is, then the implant should be developed to become a part of this "conscious" area, not just the input for it. This is the main feature of this "conscious" brain prosthesis - it works on par with biological brain to generate consciousness.
Raúl wrote:
What I mean in that the generation of qualia should emerge globally from the complex brain-BCI-device. I wouldn't say that the BCI is conscious, I'd rather say that the whole system is conscious (which was the case already when the brain was alone).
Exactly! And I also think that this approach can be helpful to address the problem of "cracking the neural code" - as described in my presentation.
Raúl wrote:
And then, I come back to the same point I argued in the my first post: this is like adding a prosthesis, but not adding phenomenal states...
But the prosthesis would then add additional phenomenal states to experience!
Raúl wrote:
The point you raised is quite interesting though, I'd say you're trying to locate qualia somewhere, which maybe the issue here.
Ok, but if we have, for example, two brains - yours and mine, then there are two separate qualia, each located in separate place. So it is actually very real for qualia to have a specific "location".
Inside the single brain, the same multiple qualia in separate areas can exists, if these areas are not integrated sufficiently. For example, when two hemispheres are separated after surgery.
If we insert an implant to the brain, we can have several cases here:
1. brain has qualia, implant is complex enough and has qualia too, and they communicate between each other as would two people communicate between themselves. if we alter the connection between implant and the brain, in that way to make them integrated, then a complex system with single mind will emerge, same as two hemispheres comprising the brain.
2. brain has qualia, implant does some processing but there is no qualia in implant. this qualia can appear, however, when we make the implant integrated enough. again, additional phenomenal state will be added to our mind by implant.
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Raúl
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/07/13 17:42
Thanks for the comments.
I don't feel comfortable with the idea of locations associated to qualia. Qualia themselves are inmaterial, therefore, no location can be assigned to them. Anyhow, I think you are actually referring to the location of the machinery that generates qualia.
Having said that, It is interesting to note that some authors have argued (Balduzzi and Tononi) that geometry could be used to characterize qualia, i.e. to define a "qualia space". In this sense, your approach could be characterized as adding additional dimensions to the qualia space. Al least intuitively it does make sense...
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Ptessarur
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/08/23 00:47
I believe three functions are necessary/essential for free will operation both in animals (natural free will operation) and robots (artificial free will operation) : The Conscious Mind, The Sub-Conscious Mind, and The Virtual/Invisible Mind. Humans and Artificial Intelligence already have these. What is needed in addition is to de-cypher the structures in robots to contain and capture all the three. They both have to be endowed with the free will conscious (fed by empirical evidence), the sub-conscious (equivalent to the internet, but within reach through the conscious), and virtual memory (self copy-parting into 'space' or the air but resonating data/information as backup string-file-photons). I believe this way robots can be fully independent free-willed machines. Of course they'll need modems for their interaction
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Raúl
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Re:Conscious brain implants - 2010/10/02 11:32
Hi, I am not familiar with the concept you mentioned: "virtual/invisible mind". Is this part of any published theory that I could have a look in more detail??
Are you actually referring to virtual machine functionalism (Sloman, Chrisley)?
Thanks,
Raúl.
Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul |
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