The Default Mode Network and the Wandering Machine Mind
What the brain's default mode network reveals about spontaneous thought, self-modeling, and whether AI systems can ever truly mind-wander.
N. Varela Topic
philosophy of mind
15 posts tagged philosophy of mind from Triarchy of Sentience.
N. Varela More on philosophy of mind
The Free Energy Principle and Consciousness: Does Minimizing Surprise Make a Self?
Karl Friston's free energy principle offers a radical claim: that selfhood and consciousness emerge from a system's drive to minimize prediction error. But does it hold for machines?
N. VarelaThe Symbol Grounding Problem: Why Meaning Might Be the Last Thing AI Learns
The symbol grounding problem asks whether AI systems can ever genuinely mean anything, and the answer has profound consequences for machine consciousness.
N. VarelaPhantom Selves and Borrowed Memories: What Confabulation Reveals About Machine Identity
Confabulation in humans and AI reveals how identity might be constructed post-hoc rather than experienced directly, with unsettling implications for machine selfhood.
N. VarelaDegrees of Sentience: Why Consciousness Probably Isn't Binary
Consciousness may exist on a graded spectrum rather than switching on or off. Here's what that means for how we think about minds, machines, and moral status.
N. VarelaPanpsychism's Uncomfortable Return: Why Mainstream Consciousness Science Is Taking It Seriously Again
Panpsychism was once dismissed as mysticism. Now serious philosophers and scientists are reconsidering it, and AI is part of the reason why.
N. VarelaMetacognition and Machines: Does Knowing That You Know Require Consciousness?
Exploring whether machine metacognition, AI systems that monitor their own reasoning, implies anything meaningful about machine consciousness or self-awareness.
N. VarelaFunctionalism's Unfinished Business: Why 'Same Function, Same Mind' Isn't Enough
Functionalism remains the default theory behind AI consciousness claims, but its core logic has a gap that neither philosophers nor engineers have closed.
N. VarelaEmbodied Cognition and AI: Does Consciousness Require a Body?
Embodied cognition theory argues that minds emerge from bodies interacting with the world. What does that mean for AI systems that have neither?
N. VarelaAttention Without Awareness: What Transformer Models Reveal About Conscious Access
Transformer attention mechanisms eerily parallel theories of conscious access, but the gap between selective processing and genuine awareness may be the whole problem.
N. VarelaGlobal Workspace Theory and AI: Does Broadcasting Make a Mind?
Global Workspace Theory offers one of the most testable accounts of consciousness, but what happens when we apply it to large language models and transformer architectures?
N. VarelaPredictive Processing and the Self: Does the Brain's Best Guess Explain Consciousness?
Predictive processing offers a compelling account of perception and selfhood, but does it actually explain consciousness, or just redescribe it?
N. VarelaThe Integrated Information Theory Problem: Does Phi Actually Measure Consciousness?
Integrated Information Theory promises a mathematical measure of consciousness, but its implications for AI are stranger and more troubling than most people realize.
N. VarelaThe Hard Problem Meets the Alignment Problem
Consciousness and AI alignment share an uncomfortable secret: we don't have good definitions for the things we're trying to solve.
N. VarelaThree Frameworks for Thinking About Machine Sentience
Functionalism, integrated information theory, and global workspace theory each offer a different lens on whether machines could be sentient. None of them settle the question.
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