Davmandy Collection

Medium Musings on memories and Darwin machines In a recent post, I looked at consciousness from the perspective of the prefrontal synthesis model. In this view, our experience of the world is mediated by neuronal ensembles, collections of neurons that fire in synchrony when activated. ObjectNEs, as these circuits are called, organize our sensations according to the principle that ‘what fires together wires together.’ By their very nature, ObjectNEs consolidate the buzzing booming confusion around us, condensing our model of the world into a manageable number of perceptual building blocks. ObjectNEs are active during sensory integration, but they can also be ‘pinged’ deliberately by the prefrontal cortex, the planning center at the front of the brain. The purposeful activation of a sequence of ObjectNEs is what we mean when we talk about a “train of thought”. ObjectNEs can also light up spontaneously in unexpected combinations, a process that we experience as dreaming or hallucinating.

  Article at Medium The first truly sentient AI will be a chatty self-driving car that decides where to go on vacation, and dreams about the trip beforehand. Recent strides in dream research may have quietly led to a simple and practical definition of consciousness. Researchers investigating neural correlates of dreaming have discovered a hotspot (posterior cortical hot zone), which when activated is associated with dream recall on awakening. Conversely, suppression of this region is predictive of reports of dreamless sleep. This finding is consistent with a theory known as Prefrontal Synthesis. In this model, percepts abstracted from our interaction with the environment are represented as distributed neural ensembles, circuits defined by the synchronous firing of constituent neurons according to the principle of ‘what fires together wires together’. When an ObjectNE as these ensembles are known is activated, we become conscious of the corresponding percept. When the prefrontal