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Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind

Stephen Grossberg · 2 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind" by Stephen Grossberg.
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Amazon Summary
How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mindunderstand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for thepast 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about theworld, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality andreligion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problemsin machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processesin all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enablinghumans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
There's a fully fleshed out theory of how specific synchronizing oscillations, resulting in "resonance" generate conscious experiences, including the kind of memories discussed here.

Before you dismiss this as another kooky consciousness theory, please let me add that this the only mechanistically precise one out there. All others are black-box models (yes, a bold claim!)

Sadly, it is completely ignored within neuroscience even if its "founder", Stephen Grossberg, is generally recognized as one of the pioneers of computational neuroscience and responsible for many now-commonplace ideas.

(plug) We've even written a book that, among other things, offers a gentle introduction to this work https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...

And for anyone in AI/neuroscience I’d really, really recommend reading Grossberg’s Magnum Opus with an open mind: https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Resonant-Brain-Makes/d...

This article may be a good place to start, even if the terminology takes a little getting used to: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360801...

—-

Coming back to the question of consciousness, I’d wager that we are going to have to ask the question of artificial consciousness very seriously as AI models continue to get better at a rapid pace (no, they are not conscious yet). You might find this worth reading: https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...

⬐ causi
Before you dismiss this as another kooky consciousness theory, please let me add that this the only mechanistically precise one out there

It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me. The staggering number of elements making up the system we call a brain is likely to lead to some truly unintuitive solutions.

I have not heard of the guy or ART.

Extremely high reviews on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Resonant-Brain-Makes/p...

⬐ rmbyrro
The curve doesn't look legit. Percentages for each star level. I have the impression Amazon could predict potentially manipulated reviews with reasonable accuracy by analyzing the curve.

Edit: not claiming or implying anything about the author, book or the reviews. Just pointing the curve doesn't look legit to me.

⬐ cowpig
Unfortunately Amazon reviews, at least in my experience, mean very little any more. There are just too many marketing firms that specialize in messing with them.

Anecdotal example: a few months ago I bought an electric shaver that was very inexpensive and had thousands of 5-star reviews. It failed two months later, and when I went to leave the negative review, I found that the product no longer existed, but another identical-looking product with a different name from a different(?) company was the best-reviewed cheap electric shaver.

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