consciousness

Your EEG is an ocean. Separating this signal out into different waveforms can tell us a bunch about what you’re experiencing. We might look at your beta waves, from 15-30 Hz, which are associated with your experience of active conscious processing. Or theta, from 4-7 Hz, which you make lots of in REM sleep, as well as flow, hypnagogic, and creative... See more

If consciousness really can arise in a jumble of silicon chips, we run the risk of creating countless AIs — beings, really — that can not only intelligently perform tasks, but develop feelings about their lives. 

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Rather than asking if each new AI system is finally the one that has conscious experience, focusing on the more fundamental question of

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scientific investigations of the boundaries between conscious and unconscious systems are urgently needed, and they cite ethical, legal and safety issues that make it crucial to understand AI consciousness. For example, if AI develops consciousness, should people be allowed to simply switch it off after use?

Eastern philosophies and yogic systems have developed incredibly sophisticated, broad-spectrum models of consciousness. Western science, on the other hand, has managed to construct an edifice of physics and neuroscience while thinking in 15-30 Hz that pretty much exclusively describes phenomena we experience in 15-30 Hz, relegating everything else... See more