#consciousness

#consciousness

More than half a billion people around the world have downloaded artificial-intelligence chatbot companion apps such as Xiaoice and Replika. These virtual confidantes can provide empathy, support and, sometimes, deep relationships. Chatbots, of course, aren't consciousthey just feel that way to users, who often become emotionally attached to them. As AI grows more fluent in mimicking human empathy, language and memory, we're left to confront an uneasy problem: If a machine can fake awareness so well, what exactly is the real thing?

For some people, sleep brings a peculiar kind of wakefulness. Not a dream, but a quiet awareness with no content. This lesser-known state of consciousness may hold clues to one of science's biggest mysteries: what it means to be conscious. The state of conscious sleep has been widely described for centuries by different Eastern contemplative traditions. For instance, the Indian philosophical school of the Advaita Vedanta, grounded in the interpretation of the Vedas - one of the oldest texts in Hinduism - understands deep sleep or "sushupti" as a state of "just awareness" in which we merely remain conscious.

I mean, the amazing thing about our circumstances that each one of us is in a position that is in some sense, as free and as profound and as in touch with reality, as any other position in this universe, where you stand, the universe is illuminated as you, as your experience in this moment. And that we call this substratum of experience, consciousness, for lack of a better word.

Psychologists and philosophers have developed competing theories of humor, claiming laughter results from factors such as superiority, relief, incongruity, and benign violations.

The sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, that is where the illusion lies.

Increasingly, organoids are being fused to create 'assembloids', complexes of interacting organoids. Sergiu Pasca's laboratory at Stanford University has created an assembloid that models the human spinothalamic pathway, a neural circuit critical for the transmission of sensory information from the body to the brain.

For Hegel, intelligence is always artificial, with nothing natural about understanding, consciousness, or intelligence itself, challenging the idea of innate behavior versus learned actions.

Matthew Sacchet, director of the meditation research program at Harvard Medical School, indicates that meditation, while beneficial for many, can also lead to significant suffering in some individuals. This unexpected outcome has prompted calls for greater scrutiny by researchers and clinicians into the effects of meditation beyond its therapeutic applications.

"Reflecting on one's life in a consciousness-raising session, Gornick wrote, was 'rather like shaking a kaleidoscope and watching all the same pieces rearrange themselves into an altogether other picture.'"},{

I think we've got much too narrow a picture of reality. What we need is a larger, more inclusive model of reality, which includes all these anomalies in the Universe.

"Until the early 20th century, scientists believed they had most of the puzzle solved. They viewed the world as a perfect machine, predictable and logical, based on Newton's laws."

Donald Griffin's pioneering work in cognitive ethology revealed how consciousness plays a vital role in animal decision-making and survival strategies.

This research opens the door to a deeper understanding of lucid dreaming as an intricate state of consciousness by pointing to the possibility that conscious experience can arise from within sleep itself.