Atomistic and systems approaches to consciousness

Stance: an international undergraduate philosophy journal

Some views of holism fail to fully encapsulate the structure and independence of consciousness while others are reductionist in their insistence on a strict structure. After examining holism and mental state consciousness, I move to my own proposal for the structure of consciousness: experiential swaths. By highlighting the phenomenal interdependence of some aspects of consciousness without conceding that all aspects are so strongly intertwined, experiential swaths allow for further conceptual structurization within consciousness.

THE SYSTEM STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE PROBLEM OF ADEQUACY, 2021

Given the complex nature of consciousness, many agree that in order to study it properly we need a nonreductive, pluralistic and synthetic (i.e. systemic) approach. Despite the relative popularity of the systems methodology in the vast field of the study of consciousness, system approach (i.e., modeling something as a system) is very well used for a reductive purposes, and there is no consensus on the issue of a clear understanding of the non-reductive use of one or another system approach in area. Hence, the purpose of my research is methodological reflection on the problem of the adequacy of the system approach for the non-reductive deliberation on the problem of consciousness. I formulate criteria of adequacy in a form of three principles that should be followed in any non-reductive (not just systemic) study of consciousness. The principle of structural-ontological (or metaphysical) neutrality is the first one. This principle suspends all metaphysical solutions to the problem of consciousness and plays the role of a necessary precondition. Many pointless disputes in the field could be avoided if the disputing parties adhered to this principle. The second principle of differentiation of ontic modes of experience and epistemic perspectives retains the multifaceted complex structure of consciousness after it is stripped of its metaphysical baggage. The principle of embodiment adds some feedback dynamics to the story. At the next step I implement the principles of adequacy in a particular case of the General parametric systems theory, developed by a philosopher and logician Avenir Uyemov. The conceptual foundations of this theory in relation to its compliance with the criteria of adequacy are revealed. It turns out that two of three principles exist at the metalanguage of the theory. The principle of neutrality follows by definition of the General system theoryi.e., theory applicable to all kinds of systems. And the principle of embodiment exists as a feedback of the substrate to the structure of a system. The principle of differentiation in this case is the most crucial. If this theory is not enriched at the level of object-language with epistemic perspectives and ontic modes of experience, then we won't get a no-reductive explication of consciousness, even if it remains systemic by definition. In the end I give a systemic definition of consciousness through its basic feature which is (I conjecture) modeling of reality or different kinds of experience through epistemic perspectives, where complex structural ontology of consciousness 'in-forms' or structures its epistemology, which in turn models it in accordance with the needs of a conscious system.

ALEFTP 7501 Approaches to Consciousness: Introductory Materials, 2021

Introductory essay and glossary for the Alef Trust 7501 Approaches to Consciousness course. Updates for August 2025 include: •An extra paragraph in the essay detailing the May 2025 debate over IIT and 'pseudoscience' in Nature. •An additional glossary entry on Time consciousness. • mention of a new paper by Woollacott & Weiler in the 'Transmission theories of consciousness' entry. The paper discusses possible neural substrates of the 'filter'. • Other minor updates include mention of a 2025 article on Free Will from Scientific American. This suggests that we do not yet have sufficient evidence from neuroscience to disprove free will.

Citeseer

Our title, A Unified Theory of Consciousness, alludes to three ideas central to this book.

Acta Psychologica, 1994

2002

Human and Machine Consciousness, 2018

I have really appreciated the help of Anil Seth, who supported my application for a Turing Fellowship and was very welcoming during my time at the University of Sussex. I am also grateful to the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex for giving me a place to work. I greatly enjoyed conversations about consciousness with my colleagues at Sussex. I would also like to thank Owen Holland, whose CRONOS project started my work on human and machine consciousness, and the reviewers of this book, who had many helpful suggestions. I owe a warm debt of gratitude to my parents, Alejandro and Penny Gamez, who have always given me a great deal of support and encouragement. Contents List of Illustrations 1 List of Illustrations All images are © David Gamez, CC BY 4.0. 2.1. Visual representation of a bubble of perception. 2.2. The presence of an invisible god explains regularities in the visible world. 2.3. Colour illusion. 17 2.4. Primary and secondary qualities. 2.5. The relationship between a bubble of experience and a brain. 21 2.6. Interpretation of physical objects as black boxes. 2.7. The relationship between a bubble of experience and an invisible physical brain. 2.8. The emergence of the concept of consciousness. 3.1. The use of imagination to solve a scientific problem. 3.2. Imagination cannot be used to understand the relationship between consciousness and the invisible physical world. 3.3. Learnt association between consciously experienced brain activity and the sensation of an ice cube. 4.1. Problem of colour inversion. 51 4.2. Some of the definitions and assumptions that are required for scientific experiments on consciousness. 4.3. The relationship between macro-and micro-scale e-causal events. 4.4. Assumptions about the relationship between CC sets, consciousness and first-person reports. 5.1. The measurement of an elephant's height in a scientist's bubble of experience. 5.2. Theory of consciousness (c-theory). 2 Human and Machine Consciousness 7.1. Information c-theory. 97 8.1. Soap bubble computer. 9.1. Testing a c-theory's prediction about a conscious state. 9.2. Testing a c-theory's prediction about a physical state. 9.3. Deduction of the conscious state of a bat. 10.1. Modifications of a bubble of experience. 10.2. A reliable c-theory is used to realize a desired state of consciousness. 11.1. A reliable c-theory is used to build a MC4 machine. 11.2. A reliable c-theory is used to deduce the consciousness of an artificial system.

Studia Humana, Volume 8:4 (2019), pp. 27—33, 2019

This article demonstrates that certain issues of philosophy of mind can only be explained via strict observance of the logical law of identity, that is, use of the term "consciousness" in only one meaning. Based on the understanding of consciousness as space in which objects distinguished by the subject are represented, this article considers problems such as the fixation of the consciousness level, correlation between consciousness and thought, between the internal and the external, and between consciousness and the body. It demonstrates the insufficiency of the reactive conception of action for the resolution of the hard problem of consciousness and the necessity of a transition to an active paradigm in which many issues in philosophy of mind would be formulated differently.

Within theoretical and empirical enquiries, many different meanings associated with consciousness have appeared, leaving the term itself quite vague. This makes formulating an abstract and unifying version of the concept of consciousness – the main aim of this article –into an urgent theoretical imperative. It is argued that consciousness, characterized as dually accessible (cognized from the inside and the outside), hierarchically referential (semantically ordered), bodily determined (embedded in the working structures of an organism or conscious system), and useful in action (pragmatically functional), is a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. A gradational approach, however, despite its explanatory advantages, can lead to some counterintuitive consequences and theoretical problems. In most such conceptions consciousness is extended globally (attached to primitive organisms or artificial systems), but also locally (connected to certain lower-level neuronal and bodily processes). For example, according to information integration theory (as introduced recently by Tononi and Koch, 2014), even such simple artificial systems as photodiodes possess miniscule amounts of consciousness. The major challenge for this article, then, is to establish reasonable, empirically justified constraints on how extended the range of a graded consciousness could be. It is argued that conscious systems are limited globally by the ability to individuate information (where individuated information is understood as evolutionarily embedded, socially altered, and private), whereas local limitations should be determined on the basis of a hypothesis about the action-oriented nature of the processes that select states of consciousness. Using these constraints, an abstract concept of consciousness is arrived at, hopefully contributing to a more unified state of play within consciousness studies itself.