A self-published tome on whether humans are robots.

The idea that we are robots – nothing more than machines automatically carrying out pre-programmed instructions – has to be one of the most difficult concepts for the human mind to accept.

After all, if there’s one thing that appears to be perfectly obvious about being human it’s that we’re free to make our own choices, free to do what we like with our lives.

The purpose of Conscious Robots is to encourage us to face up to the reality of being human

to help us accept that we’re robots
to understand how ‘being a robot’ affects our lives
most importantly, to understand how it affects our chances of getting what we want out of life.

2007-03-12: Rat Metacognition

Jonathon Crystal figured out a clever experiment to test rats’ awareness of their thinking. They presented the rats with a “sound classification” test: They trained the rats to associate a long, 8-second burst of static with pushing 1 particular lever, and then trained them to associate a short, 2-second burst of static with a different lever. They’d play 1 of the 2 sounds, and if the rats pushed the correct lever, they’d get 6 food pellets; pushing the wrong lever got them nothing. The rats quickly learned to distinguish the 2 sounds by duration, and ate tons of pellets. Then things got interesting. The scientists made the test harder. They started playing bursts of static that were of intermediate length — 4 seconds, 5 seconds, 6 seconds — and thus harder to classify as “long” or “short”. Suddenly, the rats decided to forgo the test and simply stick their noses in the food trough to get the smaller reward. Apparently, the rats realized that they were now unlikely to pass this much-harder test, so they skipped it

2007-04-04: Animal metacognition. It would be helpful to have a chart with the various components of sentience / intelligence, and give examples for which species have which.

The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution

2007-08-22: Lack of metacognition in children and rats might be due to experimental deficiencies.

most tests of metacognition asked the participants to use words to describe their internal states — which is why little kids couldn’t do it very well. The barrier was linguistic, not cognitive. So she devised a metacognition test that asked preschoolers instead to point to pictures to illustrate their internal state. Ghetti would pose the kids a question, and ask them to point to a picture of a confident-looking child if they were sure of the answer, or a doubtful-looking child if they weren’t sure.

2007-12-29: Role of the thalamus

Some seemingly unconscious patients have startlingly complex brain activity. What can it tell us about the nature of consciousness? Early evidence indicates a link between consciousness and the ability to integrate information. In a study of 60 patients in the vegetative state, the 7 patients who later awakened recovered brain metabolism in regions that connect the cortex with the thalamus, a relay center in the brain.

2009-06-27: Whale Cognition

They might even deserve to be considered people.

Not human people, but as occupying a similar range on the spectrum as the great apes, for whom the idea of personhood has moved from preposterous to possible. Chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos possess self-awareness, feelings and high-level cognitive powers. So do whales and dolphins. Their capacities could be even more ancient than our own, dating to an evolutionary explosion in brain size that took place millions of years before the last common ancestor of the great apes existed.

2013-12-12: the network is the computer

What happens to the brain under anesthesia suggests that the synthesis and integration of information among many different parts of the brain is the best measure of consciousness. This communication among regions is consciousness itself.

2015-12-01: Fish consciousness?

Researchers have made the first observations in fish of an increase in body temperature of 2–4 ºC when zebrafish were subjected to a stressful situation. This phenomenon is called “emotional fever” because it’s related to the emotions that animals feel in the face of an external stimulus, which been linked, controversially, with their consciousness. Until now, emotional fever had been observed in mammals, birds and certain reptiles, but never in fish, which is why fish have been regarded as animals without emotions or consciousness. Despite the small size of the fish brain, detailed morphological and behavioral analyses have highlighted similarities between some fish brain structures and those seen in other vertebrates, such as the hippocampus (linked to learning and spatial memory) and the amygdala (linked to emotions) of mammals.

2015-12-14: Bicameralism

Although Julian Jaynes, who died in 1997, never completed another book, The Origins of Consciousness in Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind will carry his name into eternity. John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that when Jaynes “speculates that until 3 ka BP men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods … we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence he finds in ancient literature, modern behaviorism, and aberrant psychological phenomenon such as hypnotism, possession, glossolalia, prophecy, poetry, and schizophrenia

2016-04-27: Insects are conscious

“Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentrico, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience.” Consciousness appeared to be associated with the “midbrain”. That part of the brain is the ancient core of the brain, which supports awareness for us and apparently for insects, too.

2016-06-19: Split brain

So, if your brain is split, who is the ‘you’ in this situation? From the outside, it’s tempting to think of the part of the brain that’s speaking as the person, but something is hearing and answering questions. And, though right brain can’t speak, it does understand faces, which left brain can’t. If this is you, you don’t know who your friends and family are in a crowd. This act of cutting exposes two minds in one head, and the talking mind doesn’t know there’s someone else in the house. The left brain can describe the situation it’s in, but nonetheless will constantly be surprised by right brain’s actions and explain them away. There’s a question to be asked here: Why, after separation, does right brain not totally freak out, but instead plays along helpfully, answering questions, and listening to left-brain’s dumb stories about what’s happening.

2016-11-11: Seats of consciousness?

Neurologists haves identified 3 specific regions of the brain that appear to be critical components of consciousness: 1 in the brainstem, involved in arousal; and 2 cortical regions involved in awareness. “This is most relevant if we can use these networks as a target for brain stimulation for people with disorders of consciousness. If we zero in on the regions and network involved, can we someday wake someone up who is in a persistent vegetative state? That’s the ultimate question.”

2018-01-05: Awake Under Anesthesia

There are no perfect studies of awareness under anesthesia. Studies like Russell’s, which use real patients, tend be poorly designed; those that use volunteers don’t involve real surgery. Investigating anesthetized awareness without surgery “is a bit like testing your windshield wipers without rain.” “A surgical incision has a galvanizing effect even on an anesthetized patient,. As the scalpel enters, her heart beats faster, her blood pressure rises, sometimes she jerks. She might edge closer to consciousness.” Another approach, of course, is simply to ask large numbers of people what they remember after they emerge from surgery. A study published in The Lancet in 2000 surveyed 12K patients who had undergone surgery. The researchers found 18 people whom they could be confident had been awake. The patients were surveyed at different times—just after the operation and at various intervals thereafter. Some remembered their experiences right away; others had no recollections at first but recalled the surgery after 1 week or 2. 1 remembered the surgery in detail only 24 days afterward.

2019-03-18: Consciousness Origin

Kurzgesagt explores how scientists believe consciousness first evolved, from organisms moving more quickly when consuming food to animals who can remember where they hid food to reading the minds of competitors and allies

2019-07-07: Animal consciousness

Despite groans of anthropomorphism, it’s not your imagination. Animals have a far deeper internal life than we’ve known.

and

For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.

2019-09-26: Consciousness without Language

There is ample evidence from split-brain patients that consciousness can be preserved in the nonspeaking cortical hemisphere, usually the right one. These are patients whose corpus callosum has been surgically cut to prevent aberrant electrical activity from spreading from one to the other hemisphere. Almost half a century of research demonstrates that these patients have 2 conscious minds. Each cortical hemisphere has its own mind, each with its own peculiarities. The left cortex supports normal linguistic processing and speech; the right hemisphere is nearly mute but can read whole words and, in some cases at least, can understand syntax and produce simple speech and song.

It could be countered that language is necessary for the proper development of consciousness but that once this has taken place, language is no longer needed to experience. This hypothesis is difficult to address comprehensively, as it would require raising a child under severe social deprivation.

2020-10-31: Electromagnetic Consciousness

It’s far too early to claim that the brain’s electromagnetic fields are the primary seat of consciousness with much confidence. But philosophers and neuroscientists who have proposed electromagnetic field theories of consciousness, of which my own General Resonance Theory is one variety, are building up evidence.

2022-07-18: Bee cognition

Bees can count, recognize images of human faces and learn simple tool use and abstract concepts. He thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognize themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees. When Chittka deliberately trained a “demonstrator bee” to carry out a task in a sub-optimal way, the “observer bee” would not simply ape the demonstrator and copy the action she had seen, but would spontaneously improve her technique to solve the task more efficiently “without any kind of trial and error”. He thinks the level of sophisticated cognition bees exhibit means it’s unlikely they do not feel any emotions at all.

2023-07-08: Adversarial collaborations

What helped resolve the wager was the outcome, or rather the lack of a decisive outcome, of an “adversarial collaboration” organized by a consortium called COGITATE. Adversarial collaborations encourage researchers from different theoretical camps to jointly design experiments that can distinguish between their theories. In this case, the theories in question were integrated information theory (IIT), the brainchild of Giulio Tononi, and the neuronal  global workspace theory (GWT), championed by Stanislas Dehaene. The 2 scientists made predictions, based on their respective theories, about what kinds of brain activity would be recorded in an experiment in which participants looked at a series of images—but neither predicted outcome fully played out.