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Rethinking Consciousness

A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

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Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.

Then some animals evolved covert attention - a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory.

Graziano proposes that in order to monitor and control this specialized attention, the brain evolved a simplified model of it - a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness.

In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.

©2019 Michael S. A. Graziano (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Biological Sciences Evolution Evolution & Genetics Neuroscience & Neuropsychology Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science Human Brain Consciousness
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Graziano provides a great state of the art review about different views and theories, which have many commonalities. I knew about IIT and the Global Workspace Theory and I enjoyed Graziano comments

His view, is that if we take the universe as a 1st person videogame, an essential part of consciousness is the attention schema, which is like the interface with the game. It shows us what we see, what we think (quest, hints), what we hear. The game has an inner model of the world, the different entities, but the first person player has also a model of the player awareness.

The Attention Schema

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I felt inspired reading this book. it got me thinking about ways in which we might exist in the future and I find that compelling.

insightful

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