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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Theory of Consciousness

I have just finished reading Introducing Artificial Intelligence, Introducing Mind & Brain, and Introducing Consciousness from Icon books. In reading these back to back, it reminded me that they are all different views on the same subject. This was a rewarding experience for me. I recommend that you read these books together if you can.

"Introducing Mind & Brain" could have been titled "Introducing Neuroscience". Those readers having difficulty buying into the functionalist materialist viewpoint described in the other two books will find persuasive evidence here.

"Introducing Consciousness" is where you will find the heavy duty philosophy stuff which the other two books touch upon. It reminded me of a couple of related papers that I wrote for a "Philosophy of Mind and Psychology" course a few years back. In Could a Computer Feel Pain?, I reveal my functionalist leanings. In Representational Systems, I tie my theory of consciousness to recurrent networks.

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