2007 Special IssueConsciousness and metarepresentation: A computational sketch
Section snippets
The radical plasticity thesis
We would thus like to defend the following claim: Conscious experience occurs if and only if an information processing system has learned about its own representations of the world. To put this claim even more provocatively: Consciousness is the brain’s theory about itself, gained through experience interacting with the world, others, and, crucially, with itself. We call this claim the “Radical Plasticity Thesis”, for its core is the notion that learning is what makes us conscious. How so? The
Simulations: The digits problem
We illustrate two ways in which metarepresentations can be operationalized and what this might teach us about consciousness. Both simulations involve a first-order network that has to perform a simple task such as digit recognition, and a higher-order network that “observes” the internal states of the first-order network. This second network is thus wholly independent from the causal chain set up by the first-order network.
In the first simulation the higher-order network is simply trained to
Metarepresentation
The simulations sketched above illustrate how a network can be trained to observe the internal states of another network in such a manner that it can use this information to perform tasks that require knowledge of the structure of these internal states — either to reconstruct the corresponding inputs and outputs, or to actually evaluate the extent to which these internal representations will result in successful performance. In both cases, it is interesting to note that while the higher-order,
Conclusion
Thus we end with the following idea, which is the heart of the “Radical Plasticity Thesis”: The brain continuously and unconsciously learns not only about the external world, but about its own representations of it. The result of this unconscious learning is conscious experience, in virtue of the fact that each representational state is now accompanied by (unconsciously learnt) metarepresentations that convey the mental attitude with which these first-order representations are held. Thus, from
Acknowledgements
A.C. is a Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS, Belgium). B.T. is a postdoctoral fellow at the ULB — Université Libre de Bruxelles. A.P. is a Research Fellow of the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S-FNRS, Belgium). This work was supported by an institutional grant from the Université Libre de Bruxelles to A.C., by Concerted Research Action 06/11-342 titled “Culturally modified organisms: What it means to be human in the age of culture”,
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