Can Consciousness be Defined by Neuroscience Someday?

Overview

Since brain activity affects conscious experience in humans, neuroscience will help to explain consciousness. It is made up of inner, qualitative, subjective states of perception, emotion, and thought. Unified, high-quality subjectivity is its key characteristic. Conscious states are a result of neurobiological brain processes and manifest in the brain's structure. Neuroscience has provided proof that neurons are essential to consciousness. At both the small and large scales, certain components of our conscious experience are dependent on particular patterns of neuronal activity; in a sense, the connectivity of neurons computes the qualities of our experience. How can we proceed from the knowledge that some particular cell arrangements result in consciousness to the comprehension of why this would be the case?

Researchers in the Field of Neuroscience and Consciousness

The majority of neuroscience research focuses on nervous system problems, as evidenced by the funding that underpins it. The search for cures and therapies (as well as research efforts to comprehend the normal function of the brain) draws on decades of discoveries into all levels of neuronal organization, with seemingly none of it dependent on knowing too much about consciousness. However, there is a great deal of interest in and work put into studying how consciousness is created and why it has the features it does. There is no agreement on how it is produced or the best way to tackle the issue, but all research begins with the unquestionable premise that consciousness is a result of brain activity. It is certainly difficult to overestimate the impact that formal computation's rapid development and exploration—especially digital computation—has had on our understanding of how the brain functions. Modern brain scientists frequently inquire not about whether the brain is any kind of computer but rather about what kind of computer it is, as opposed to using formal computation as a metaphor. For instance, the recently developed field of connectomics makes the assumption that the revealed connectome will offer the best chance of providing answers to questions about how the brain functions in addition to the assumption that the computational aspects of the brain are sufficiently represented in the connectome.

I believe that computer science—more so than neuroscience—will finally show that nothing really needs to be specified.

We'll be engaging with machines that look to be conscious in all the important ways in not too distant future for a sizeable percentage of our day.

Even today, there are machines with goals, the ability to balance many different factors in their decisions, the ability to learn from their mistakes and modify their behavior, the ability to sense their environment using cameras and microphones, the ability to create and update an internal model of that environment, the ability to sense their own position in the environment and uniquely identify it in the model, the ability to communicate in natural language, and many more capabilities. Even while downloading consciousness is still a theoretical and futuristic technology, as research advances, more and more scientists are expressing their support for the idea that it might one day become a reality.

In the end, nobody will be able to "prove" that any computer is sentient. As a result of spending so much time around these kinds of machines, we'll probably just start treating them like them. Children raised around such machines won't even think to question them. However, people will also be aware that the machines were not made sentient by the software writers by adding some kind of secret ingredient.

I predict that when that happens, the majority of us will stop pondering the mystifying idea of consciousness. It won't need to be defined anymore since our intuition that it's a unique thing, above and above all the capabilities that artificial robots can have, will progressively disappear.

About Journal

The Journal of Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology, Our purpose is to provide a venue for academic and clinical researchers from all over the world to propose original thoughts, discuss new methodologies, and push breakthroughs in all fields of neuroscience and pharmacy. The goal of the journal is to give academic and clinical researchers from all around the world a forum where they may propose novel concepts, debate fresh approaches, and advance advancements in all branches of neuroscience and pharmacology. The magazine provides an in-depth look at a variety of neurological sciences by addressing more general elements of neurological functions, disorders, diagnosis, therapy, cure, and rehabilitation to its highly regarded readers throughout the world on an open-access platform. 

Authors can send their manuscripts to editor@iomcworld.org as an email attachment or 

Click on:  www.scholarscentral.org/submissions/neuroscience-neuropharmacology.html.