Title: Is My “Red” Your “Red”?: Evaluating Correspondences Between Qualia Structures Using Unsupervised Alignments

Abstract: Recently, there has been an explosion in the proposed number of theories on consciousness. This explosion is partly due to the limitations in the traditional empirical research program in which researchers tried to identify the so-called neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Majority of the empirical research has adopted binary response paradigms (e.g., “seen” vs “unseen”, seeing A vs B), which fail to significantly constrain theoretical development. To overcome this limitation, a novel approach to consciousness proposes to characterize qualia and their physical substrates in a structural framework. Within this framework, empirical data obtained in structural methodologies puts tighter constraints on consciousness theories, requiring explanation on relationships among qualia, relationships between qualia and neural mechanisms and so on. This presentation highlights our initial structural experiments, analyses, demonstrating the potential to map structural properties of various qualia (e.g., color, visual motion, sound) and their neuronal bases (structural connectivity and activity). We hypothesize that this approach could yield a comprehensive list of qualia-substrate relationships, akin to a "periodic table of qualia," crucial for addressing the hard problem of consciousness.

Profile: What is consciousness? Can we tell if other animals experience subjectivity, or whether there will be conscious machines or robots? These fundamental philosophical questions are being explored by neuroscientist Associate Professor Nao Tsuchiya and his team at Monash University.

Language: English

Target audience: General audience/everyone at OIST and beyond.
Freely accessible to all OIST members and guests without registration.

This talk will also be broadcast online via Zoom:

Meeting ID: 948 2002 5579
Passcode: 688115

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