Awareness: Mystery of the Mind
TUCSON, Arizona -- In the quest to make a
While the first question remains unanswered, Rodney Brooks of MIT presented new research on robot algorithms that mimic aware behavior, which leaves open to interpretation whether it will pave the road to machine consciousness or simply build a better parrot.
The third question has inspired new studies that coax consciousness into the open, discovering that some heightened forms of awareness continue after the mind falls asleep, while more rudimentary kinds of awareness can even enter the mind through a temporarily blinded eye.
At the latest Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, which ended in Tucson on Friday, Brooks reported on his lab's latest efforts to teach its robot, named Kismet, some basic protocols of aware behavior.
First, he said, came the task of finding every set of human eyes in its field of view, so Kismet could follow the primary human medium for sending cues. This was done by detecting any oval-shaped objects with human skin tones and using geometrical models of faces to isolate that face's windows on the world.
From there, motion-detecting software -- combined with knowledge of the laws of classical physics -- allowed Kismet to sense when an object was ballistic and when it was guided by a conscious hand.
Algorithms such as these allowed the robot to perform basic interactions, such as simulating short conversations with humans and following a pointing hand toward the object it points at -- a task that cat and dog owners know nature's programmers never quite debugged for some species.
"Unlike neuroscience, where scientists are presented with an existing object they have to study, we get to build these objects and understand what we put into them," Brooks said.
Pure awareness, stripped of any corresponding mental state, does present itself for study in humans, said Fred Travis of the Maharishi University of Management. Travis reported on his recent efforts to isolate patterns of brain activity in subjects who regularly practice transcendental meditation.
"Can there be a sense of self without mental content, which is just aware of its own structure without perception or thinking?" he asked.
This state of consciousness in experienced meditators was characterized by EEG data that Travis presented, which showed brain patterns of wakeful awareness (so-called theta and alpha activity) that appeared even when the subjects were in deep sleep.
These findings were also consistent with meditators' claims.
"Subjects report a permanent integration of transcendental experiences with waking, sleeping and dreaming," Travis said.
Basic forms of awareness can be studied in the absence of conscious awareness, said Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt University. He presented a series of results involving subjects who were shown different images in each eye.