Investigating the world

Let’s see what Noam Chomsky said about one concern in Philosophy of Mind today: whether our actions are somehow unconscious or not. Of course, this idea evolves defining consciousness as well. Also, a little bit about AI and robotics come together. Answering the question if our mind can be emulated using silicon, Chomsky quoted that the mind is just an organized matter, that is, our brain is a physical system. However, there are some researchers studying if the voluntary actions are sometimes preceded by a preconscious brain´s activity that can reach the consciousness or not. Thus, probably we don’t have a right access to our introspection as we believe. Following this argument, Chomsky also argued that the task of investigating our preconscious decision is a problem that is harder than the investigation of the consciousness itself. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI), meaning the way cognitive system works, investigates how the things are going on when we decide to do...

Massimini said that in HBP [ii] they have a lot of information, data and good people on the matters of consciousness, neurons, skull, etc., that need to be put together. He compares our time with the time before Darwin joined the things in the theory of evolution. Thus, even more effort in mining what they have than in collecting new data. One very interesting thing he said is about the cerebellum[a] and its disassociation with consciousness. With 80 billion neurons, cerebellum does his job unconsciously. Despite of the fact that is does wonderful tasks related to our motor coordination, what is missing in its architecture that can explain it is like a zombie? On the other hand, thalamocortical[b] system is central to consciousness. So, they should be able to compare both of them in their experiments and try to find the answer. This mystery is a very short problem that HBP has in hands and can that can be investigate deeper in its researches involving neurobiology, neuromorphi...