ArticleNeuroscience of consciousness2021
Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness.
Article in Neuroscience of consciousness, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- How do inner screens enable imaginative experience? Applying the free-energy principle directly to the study of conscious experience.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle.Communicative & integrative biology · 2025Review
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Principled Limitations on Self-Representation for Generic Physical Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Federated inference and belief sharing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Evolution of Consciousness.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A Variational Synthesis of Evolutionary and Developmental Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- A systematic approach to brain dynamics: cognitive evolution theory of consciousness.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2023Article
- A scale-free universal relational information matrix (N-space) reconciles the information problem: N-space as the fabric of reality.Communicative & integrative biology · 2023Article
- Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Metacognition as a Consequence of Competing Evolutionary Time Scales.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- From the origins to the stream of consciousness and its neural correlates.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Article
- Active inference, morphogenesis, and computational psychiatry.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Article
- Mind the matter: Active matter, soft robotics, and the making of bio-inspired artificial intelligence.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Article
- Towards the Idea of Molecular Brains.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Theories of consciousness and cognition that assume a neural substrate automatically regard phylogenetically basal, nonneural systems as nonconscious and noncognitive. Here, we advance a scale-free characterization of consciousness and cognition that regards basal systems, including synthetic constructs, as not only informative about the structure and function of experience in more complex systems but also as offering distinct advantages for experimental manipulation. Our "minimal physicalist" approach makes no assumptions beyond those of quantum information theory, and hence is applicable from the molecular scale upwards. We show that standard concepts including integrated information, state broadcasting via small-world networks, and hierarchical Bayesian inference emerge naturally in this setting, and that common phenomena including stigmergic memory, perceptual coarse-graining, and attention switching follow directly from the thermodynamic requirements of classical computation. We show that the self-representation that lies at the heart of human autonoetic awareness can be traced as far back as, and serves the same basic functions as, the stress response in bacteria and other basal systems.
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