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Category: neuroscience

But a new study suggests that it’s actually more like the frames of a movie reel running through a projector.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about consciousness and how it arises in the brain. Even though perception—such as vision and hearing—feels smooth and uninterrupted, neuroscientists aren’t entirely sure if it flows continuously like water through a tap or if it’s more like the aforementioned 24-frame-per-second movie reel.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/8-things-we-simply-dont-understand-about-the-human-brai-949442979

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The question of how exactly we experience the world through our perception of consciousness is one that’s long intrigued scientists and philosophers. And at its core are two divergent hypotheses.

On the one hand, it could be that consciousness exists as a constant, uninterrupted stream of perception, like how it feels to watch a movie. You sit down with your popcorn and experience a film from beginning to end in one continuous flow, unaware of any segmentation or breakup as you go.

But another hypothesis of consciousness reflects what a film technically is: a series of individual frames of time stitched together into a reel that – when played back – appear seamless. So which is it? Is consciousness a seamless film, or is it a reel composed of discrete moments?

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Newswise — The saying of philosopher René Descartes of what makes humans unique is beginning to sound hollow. ‘I think — therefore soon I am obsolete’ seems more appropriate. When a computer routinely beats us at chess and we can barely navigate without the help of a GPS, have we outlived our place in the world? Not quite. Welcome to the front line of research in cognitive skills, quantum computers and gaming.

Today there is an on-going battle between man and machine. While genuine machine consciousness is still years into the future, we are beginning to see computers make choices that previously demanded a human’s input. Recently, the world held its breath as Google’s algorithm AlphaGo beat a professional player in the game Go—an achievement demonstrating the explosive speed of development in machine capabilities.

But we are not beaten yet — human skills are still superior in some areas. This is one of the conclusions of a recent study by Danish physicist Jacob Sherson, published in the prestigious science journal Nature.

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You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter.

Indeed, big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray Kurzweil is outweighed by the concern expressed by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. And Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s scary thought experiments around what AI might lead to could well sustain a new strain of Nordic noir. There are, indeed, reasons to be concerned.

The fictional Hal’s refusal to open the pod bay doors in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seems a lot less like fiction than it did when the movie came out almost 50 years ago. Today, we have real reason to be concerned about the potential for autonomous drones making decisions about who to take out, or self-driving cars making a choice between hitting a roadside tree and hitting a child.

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EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.

The driver ahead suddenly stops, and you find yourself stomping on your breaks before you even realize what is going on. We would call this a reflex, but the underlying reality is much more complex, forming a debate that goes back centuries: Is consciousness a constant, uninterrupted stream or a series of discrete bits — like the 24 frames-per-second of a movie reel? Scientists from EPFL and the universities of Ulm and Zurich, now put forward a new model of how the brain processes unconscious information, suggesting that consciousness arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. The work is published in PLOS Biology.

Continuous or discrete?

Consciousness seems to work as continuous stream: one image or sound or smell or touch smoothly follows the other, providing us with a continuous image of the world around us. As far as we are concerned, it seems that sensory information is continuously translated into conscious perception: we see objects move smoothly, we hear sounds continuously, and we smell and feel without interruption. However, another school of thought argues that our brain collects sensory information only at discrete time-points, like a camera taking snapshots. Even though there is a growing body of evidence against “continuous” consciousness, it also looks like that the “discrete” theory of snapshots is too simple to be true.

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The human brain was initially used for basic survival tasks, such as staying safe and hunting and gathering. Yet, 200,000 years later, the same human brain is able to learn abstract concepts, like momentum, energy and gravity, which have only been formally defined in the last few centuries.

New research from Carnegie Mellon University has now uncovered how the brain is able to acquire brand new types of ideas. Published in Psychological Science, scientists Robert Mason and Marcel Just used neural-decoding techniques developed at CMU to identify specific physics concepts that advanced students recalled when prompted. The brain activation patterns while thinking about the physics concepts indicated that all of the students’ brains used the ancient brain systems the same way, and the patterns revealed how the new knowledge was formed — by repurposing existing neural systems.

The findings could be used to improve science instruction.

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Hmm… That would explain Alzheimer disease — It’d be like some sort of unabashedly evil version of a smart phone data caps!

Or not.

wink

NEW YORK — Is the universe just an enormous, fantastically complex simulation? If so, how could we find out, and what would that knowledge mean for humanity?

These were the big questions that a group of scientists, as well as one philosopher, tackled on April 5 during the 17th annual Isaac Asimov Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History. The event honors Asimov, the visionary science-fiction writer, by inviting experts in diverse fields to discuss pressing questions on the scientific frontiers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium and host of this year’s event, invited five intellectuals to the stage to share their unique perspectives on the problem: Zohreh Davoudi, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT whose recent book probes the universe as mathematics; James Gates, a physicist at the University of Maryland who discovered strange, error-correcting codes deep in the equations of supersymmetry; Lisa Randall, a physicist at Harvard University who thinks the simulation question is more or less irrelevant; and David Chalmers, a philosopher at New York University who regularly questions the reality that conscious minds perceive. [7 Surprising Things About the Universe].

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My own prediction is that we will see singularity with humans 1st via BMI/ BI technology and other bio-computing technology before we see a machine brain operating a the level of a healthy fully funtional human brain.

Since War of the Worlds hit the silver screen, never has the notion that machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence is more real. In this two-part series, the author examines the growing trend towards cognitive machines.

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