Have computer scientists come up with a way of measuring consciousness?
This is a rather thought provoking article, even if I don’t fully understand it. Read the introduction and then go to the section on the phi metric. Apparently, they can assign a number to how complexly different components, like our neurons, are connected.
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I saw a news program the other night that showed how they developed a program that can identify what you are thinking about by mapping every region of the brain where an image you saw would fire off in. They used a screwdriver as an example in how the brain perceives more than just the items image. The image goes in one part of the brain. The notion of it being held in your hand fires off in another part of the brain and the type and color of the screwdriver will fire off in other parts of the brain. So now they can compile a data base of these regions of the brain and what they represent as far as brain activity and by noting the areas that are being activated they now have a pretty good (great) idea what it was you were thinking of. Just fascinating and scary at the same time so measuring consciousness should be just a matter of a few mouse clicks now.
That was “60 Minutes,” right @Vignette? When it becomes available you can watch it. It was just fascinating.
The computer could also correctly read what emotion the subject was feeling.
They seem to be attempting to physically measure this:
“IIT’s conception of consciousness as mechanisms systematically integrating information through cause and effect”
So I would say no, they’re measuring a certain type and interpretation of neuron activity, which is not what I would think of as “consciousness”, but rather just a certain type of neuron activity.
I.e., for some definition of consciousness, maybe. For what I’d mean by consciousness, no.
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