Abstract
AbstractThe Stanley Miller experiment suggests that amino acid-based life is ubiquitous in our universe, although its varieties are not likely to have followed the particular, highly contingent and path-dependent, evolutionary trajectory found on Earth. Are many alien organisms likely to be conscious in ways that we would recognize? Almost certainly. Will some develop high order technology? Less likely, but still fairly probable. If so, will we be able to communicate with them? Only on a basic level, and only with profound difficulty. The argument is fairly direct.
Highlights
In spite of a popular social construction as such (e.g., Penrose, 1994), individual consciousness is no great mystery, constituting a basic evolutionary adaptation likely a half-billion years old
Bernard Baars’ global workspace/global broadcast model – the current front-runner in the Darwinian competition between consciousness theories (e.g., Dehaene and Naccache, 2001) – is itself nearly a generation old and accounts neatly, in a qualitative manner, for individual consciousnessas-we-know-it on Earth (Baars, 1988, 2005): 1. The brain can be viewed as a collection of distributed specialized networks
Individual consciousness is associated with a global workspace in the brain – a fleeting memory capacity whose focal contents are widely distributed to many unconscious specialized networks
Summary
In spite of a popular social construction as such (e.g., Penrose, 1994), individual consciousness is no great mystery, constituting a basic evolutionary adaptation likely a half-billion years old 2. Individual consciousness is associated with a global workspace in the brain – a fleeting memory capacity whose focal contents are widely distributed (broadcast) to many unconscious specialized networks. It is easy to show (Wallace, 2000; Wallace and Wallace, 2008, 2009, summarized in the Mathematical Appendix) that a substantial class of such cognitive phenomena is necessarily associated with a well-behaved information source: If there are N (n) possible behavioral and temporal output paths of that information source having length n, there will be a path-independent limit H such that log[N (n)]. Even a simple organism will have a large network of unconscious cognitive modules that, necessarily, interact through some kind of crosstalk, indexed by an average measure P
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
