Could Dreams be the Gateway to Understanding Consciousness in People and Chatbots?
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
