wow!! to say at the starting,..

if such a machine is probably built, then surely it won't be a "true peer" of human race unless it incorporates hormonal activities, five-senses sensors, evolutionary mechanism of DNA replication (algorithm self-correction), and then, a social network amongst those machines for accelerated learning, and various other things. Now, if this system is built, it may be a bit close to the humans, but i doubt it will have the same consciousness as that of us.

and, to the original question my reply would be:

Consciousness does not arise via a neural network, neither interplay of neural network with 'substrates' of consciousness. I believe the neural network is useful only for making decisions based on past experiences (the phenomenon called intelligence) and has nothing to account for consciousness. Take trees, banana, mango,etc; they don't have a neural network but still are conscious of their surroundings, as they take viable decisions like leaf-shedding in autumn etc.

How do you define consciousness, and is it shared by other animal species ?

Dear Colleagues,

Much thanks for your reply.

How can we define human consciousness would inevitably guide us in our future endeavor of embodiment of consciousness in machines. Is it just a metaphenonmenon of the mind, or some attributes arising out of the interplay between the contents of consciousness. Or is it something hyperthetic superphysical metaphenomenon unattributable to any physical tools and machineries of our mind and brain, something similar to metaphor of the mind?

"Consciousness does not arise via a neural network, neither interplay of neural network with 'substrates' of consciousness."-well,

Consciousness DO indeed arise via a neural network, and by interplay of neural network with 'substrates' of consciousness. **See Erich Harth, (1995). (Also see Jordan Pop-Jordanov, Cognitive Processing, Vol.10, Supple. 1)But the real confusion arise when one attempts to describe such real mechanisms in interplay, and the contents in specific.

Well, by substrate of consciousness, what i have meant here is in reference to "the content of consciousness", as defined by Erich Harth(1995). The conscious attribute of a human being regarding unity in sensing and perceiving the 'self' through perception originate from coordination of activities by our sense organs as a state of arousal and attention. It should however be noted that what we mean by neural correlates of consciousness is different from such neural 'substrate' or rather neural 'content' of consciousness. There is much rhetoric debate circling around such theories of consciousness; particularly, of conflicting assumptions defining the pure state of consciousness. Infact, Erich Harth has come very close when he mentioned in such terms as conscious thought originating of a self referent loop of neural circuits. However, the phenomenonlogy of consciousness as stated by Dan Zahavi differ from that of Harth and Roy John(2002). According to such study, consciousness is the combination of present information about attributes of multimodal sensory environment with that of past relevant elements of the mind ( what we call memory, as Joachim has stated above). Quantum states of the mind define such attributes as phase states deviating from random fluctuations as a a part of the facilitating synchronization and coherence of different mental states.

In much simple sense, consider wakefulness as arousal, and sleep mechanism (due to neuroendocrine effects of serotonin in the hippocampus) as vegetative states. Consciousness is attention specific. We are conscious about our direct environment while we are awake, but subconsciously aware of the indirect states of environment while in sleep(may be dreams). Even, the neural levels of consciousness can be accurately measured during and after induction of anesthetic agents, that is, by loss and return of consciousness. Any living being's subjective awareness about its environment is a direct measure of its attention specific activities that represent as ground states which can be altered by neurotropic agents, therapeutic maneuvers or by using anaesthetic agents. So, attention may be said to bridge the gap between arousal and the content of consciousness(Harth, 1995). But the real objective question is , what is the content of consciousness, that is, the substrates of consciousness? How is it manifested phenomenally? Or it is by observing the reversible nature of the electrophysiological changes resulting from loss and return of the attentive states of the mind? By definition of Psychology, consciousness arise out of experience due to changes of states-altered states. Can such altered states be modeled in machines, say robots?

Well, how can we attribute consciousness to living entities that have no organs of perception? By such organs of perception which i mean the interplay of atleast the three most common senses, the sense of vision, tactile and auditory, besides smell and taste. Yes, plants can sense their environment and act accordingly, phototactic, chemotactic etc, but they are not conscious in such terms as we human beings are. They do not "think". They do perceive their environment but by different mechanisms. Well you may compare chlorophyll(plant respiration) of leaves to retinal pigments of our eyes if you consider they can "see" their environment. It is difficult to define plant consciousness since they can feel, but they cannot move(except some locomotive plants). So whether plant intelligence refer to such soul-mind-life consciousness is a different topic beyond my logic, but i can say that they eat, drink, grow, age, die, reproduce and respond to stimuli, but they cannot for sake "Think" since they lack the machineries of the thinking mind(neural network in an organized brain). If they would have thought...thinks would have been somewhat different.

Leaf shedding by plants is their seasonal behavior and has nothing to do with plant consciousness.

_________

The references for the above i have lost somehow, searched google and got this;

COGNITIVE PROCESSING

Volume 10, Supplement 1, 71-79, DOI: 10.1007/s10339-008-0229-8

RESEARCH REPORT

Neurophysical substrates of arousal and attention

Jordan Pop-Jordanov and Nada Pop-Jordanova

A Theory of Consciousness, Perception, and Imagery

Erich Harth

Physics Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244 1130

Bharat Bhusan;

Your first assumption is highly critical and merit much praise. In that you are quite right to point out that there is need for inclusion of endocrine functional capabilities in machines where hormones play some definite role. What i am able to deduce from your analysis is that, culture shape human consciousness to some great degree and it is so i assume that really difficult to teach or program culture in robots. Since, it would be utterly difficult to model imagination in machines, it is quite acceptable that consciousness that is instilled by human culture may be difficult to get hard wired.

This however raise one more question than to answer the above one. That human culture is a feeling, a discrete collection of past experiences which can however, be scripted down through textbooks and in historical accounts. But the reality of the past surrounding human experience cannot by conceived by hard wiring, to this which I agree with you.

Your second assumption raise much debate, only if you consider the chance that there are indeed possible mechanisms by which consciousness can arise out of a neural network, only the form and nature of such artificial consciousness could be different, since that would be hard wired. It is neither my intention to support or reject your or others assumptions, but one must be critical to consider any view arising out of any subjective analysis, if that is lacking objective analysis, in part.

Your last assumption that shedding of leaves is a conscious mechanism is somewhat flawed, in that way which is a phenomenon of seasonal behavior in plants, whose causes might be interesting, but beyond this current discussion(i am not a botanist, a plant physiologist may answer better i think).

However, much thanks for your critical insights.

The ideas that it is in principle possible to build an intelligent machine date back at least to the beginning of the 1700.

We do not have yet intelligent machine today and we do not even agree on what this mean. Some people are still optimistic and they predict the incoming of a technological singularity in the near future. Machine taking over humans is a classic of the pop culture since at least fifty years.

I do not think that the culmination of the biological evolution is the creation of machine intelligence. DNA, human Language, writing/book, printing press, electronic communication, the WEB, google, reasearchgate are all tools of collective consciousness. This evolution will continue and will make us more and more collectively conscious.

On the question of conciousness you might want to listen to the March'12 NeuroPod (Nature podcast on neuroscience)

http://www.nature.com/neurosci/neuropod/index-2012-03-30.html

Any living organism, from bacteria, to plants are aware,; they act and react to their environment and try to survive and reproduce. They ave evolved during three and half billion years on this planet. It took about 3 billion years in order to evolve the highly complex Eukaryota cells. In the last half billion year they evolved city like organisms: all the plants and animals that exist today. Less then .1 billion year ago, Humanity evolved, a new major transition of the evolution of life on this planet; Humans started to form a new type of community organism with external non-organic, language mediated communication networks. That meta organism is becoming more and more self-aware. This is in continuity with the evolution of the whole cosmos. Teilhard de Chardin and many others had this kind of vision back in the 1930's.

Larry;

Respectfully, synesthesia was once a topic of vigorous research and soon it was abandoned by late 1930's, and again, it took shape from the mid of 1970's well for sure due to questions related to altered perception or drug induced hallucination (psychedelic agents).

Synesthesia involving other senses like hearing is dealt under Psychoacoustics and auditory perceptions. I did not disagree that the concept have no basis whatsoever, but it is a normal mental phenomenon which do not demand much attention. Do not mix-up normal color perception, visual (cognitive )illusion with synesthesia, i am not saying it is some magical metaphor,but as Chalmers say here;

“Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.” -David Chalmers

the topic was mostly neglected since it was much considered as normal physiological or aberrational perception. Even Ramachandran studied these aspects too in his paper;

Ramachandran, V. S. & Hubbard, E. M. (2005). Hearing colors, tasting shapes. Scientific American Mind, pp. 17-23.

Most of all, and if at all, synesthesia refers more to such experiences by famous people other than common people; as of by Tesla, Richard Feynman (grapheme-color type) and others. Indeed, it is one of the aspect of consciousness and like the latter, it carries countless definitions just to define what it is really. Sensory-cross activations is a common phenomenon since every now and then we are bombarded by a range of finite perceptual experiences whenever we perceive reality, more so in chaotic urban mazes. So, it is much like chaotic perception of reality. We may someday have a different variety of synesthesia in emotional prosody too...or visuoauditory synesthesia.

Best,

Sidharta

See Wiki;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia