Dan Dennett shared this Nick Humphrey lecture at the RI.
https://t.co/We3BW2QEGe
Nick’s best version by far of his theory of consciousness:
the positive side of illusionism, with new lines of evidential support.— Daniel Dennett (@danieldennett) September 23, 2023
I’ve watched once through and notwithstanding clear differences – evolution of warm blooded mammals (environmental independence), not just vertebrates (brain architecture) and the “attractor” version of the internal model (?) – the whole active inference monitoring cycle and the affect-centred sense of subjective self in self and empathy in others seems exactly consistent with Solms.
Only issue I have is Nick has adopted “sentience” limited to the consciousness that comes with such an internal affective model of the self – phenomenal consciousness contrasted with “blind” sensation – I guess I can be OK with that, but I’ve used it more broadly.
And like Solms Humphry’s model also predicts artificial sentience.
Anyway -just a quickie to capture the links.
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Notes:
Solms knows Humphry’s work and admires the deep evolutionary aspect. Consistent with his own functional brain architecture focus.
Using “Sentient” to mean being aware of sensed inputs – that there is a self-aware being “in” the organism doing the experiencing (and responding).
Cognitive … unpicking overloaded meanings?
(Just to be clear – getting lots of pedants on social media pointing out that they’re not telling the same story. Obviously. But what they are telling by focussing on different aspects of the consciousness story at different levels of detail is that they fit one consistent overarching story … need to find time for a proper piece here.)