Are we on the verge of solving the mystery of "one of the most mysterious secrets of science"?

We know that crabs have pain receptors like ours that make us cry or scream when we feel pain.

The behavior of this marine animal shows that something is wrong when the chef puts it alive in a pot boiling and that his tail is as if he was suffering a lot.

Does cancer feel pain as we feel or is its movement simply a natural reaction?

A human being is accompanied by complex cognitive experiences that overwhelm his entire mind, but we can not assume that the same thing happens with animals, especially those whose brains are very different from the human brain. Scientists believe that organisms such as lobster are completely lacking in internal experiences in relation to what is in our minds, humans.

"Dogs, whose actions are very similar to humans and whose bodies and brains do not differ much from us, are likely to see and hear things as we see and hear them, and they are not in complete absence, "said Julio Tononi, neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sea, the picture will be less clear. "

Scientists are trying to determine when consciousness will develop in the human brain and whether computers will become unconscious days like humans.

Tonyoni may have answered these questions through his theory of "integrated information," one of the most important theories of consciousness in recent years. Despite the uncertainty of the results of this theory so far, they provide a viable experience and application and could therefore provide a satisfactory answer in the near future.

Tononi says that he began at an early age to be interested in the study of ethics and philosophy. "I understood that knowing the meaning of consciousness and knowing how to do it is essential to understand the position of man in the universe and the purpose of his life".

"Direct exposure to neuroscience and psychotropic conditions put him face to face with unconscious people, totally or partially, in a way that they do not see in a person in good standing. health, "he said.

In 2004, he published his first description of his theory before expanding it and developing it later.

The theory begins with a set of beliefs about consciousness. Tononi says that it is necessary to describe an experience as a conscious experience to be "in a particular style" – as to distinguish things from others. The experience must be "specific" and "distinct", that is to say different from others, which paves the way for the acquisition of many potential experiences.

This experience must be "integrated", which means that if you look at a red book on a table, its shape, color and location – though treated separately in the brain – are all integrated simultaneously into a conscious experience.

Based on these beliefs, Tononi hypothesized that human (or animal, or even automated) consciousness can be identified by "integrated intelligence" (or computer). According to his theory, the higher the degree of exchange and information processing between the different components contributing to this experience, the higher the level of awareness.

To understand this in a practical way, the visual system of the brain can be compared to the digital camera: this one receives the falling light on its sensor units, very high number due to the number of units of pixel.

But the units of pixels do not "talk" to each other and do not share information, but each unit records a very small point of the image and, without its integration, can not consist of a rich conscious experience.

The human retina, like a digital camera, has many sensor units that initially capture small elements of the scene, but these data are exchanged and processed in different areas of the brain, some of which process colors and adjust the raw data to Light level function so we can identify the colors. In different circumstances.

Other areas of the eye examine the lines and curves, including guessing the hidden parts – like the bottom of a book behind a cup of coffee – so you can recognize the overall shape. Thus, these regions share their information and move them to higher levels of aggregation of different elements, until a conscious experience emerges in the form that one's experimented.

The same thing applies to memories. But aside from recording digital camera images, these memories are not stored separately, but are merged and interconnected to form a meaningful story. Whenever we experience a new experience, this experience is built into the previous information, so that the taste of a candy can remind us of a childhood experience.

A study published in 2015 examined people who had been placed under various types of anesthesia, including propobol anesthesia and xenon anesthesia. To determine the brain's ability to combine information with one another, the researchers introduced participants' brains to a magnetic field to activate a small portion of the cerebral cortex, a procedure that results in complex brain activity in the awake subject. , reflecting the response of different parts of the brain. Different groups of neurons in the brain.

But the brains of people with propofol and xenon have not shown this answer. Brain waves are much simpler than brain activity when you wake up. The drug seemed to have invalidated the information fusion of the brain, thereby closing the person's self-awareness.

The researchers compared this to other people who were taking ketamine – which makes it insensitive to the outside world and therefore used for anesthesia, but elicits delusional fantasies other than the complete absence caused by propofol or xenon. The team found that brain waves were more active in ketamine than in total anesthesia. In the case of ketamine, the person was separated from the outside world but remained connected to an active inner world.

Tonyoni has also achieved similar results in studying sleep: during "REM sleep", when dreams are active, brain waves are more active than other sleep phases and are more likely to be integrated into the brain during sleep. dreams as awareness.

But stronger evidence is still needed to confirm this theory of one of the most mysterious of science, consciousness. Tononi relies on an indirect and non-existent measure of the existence of an integration of information in the brain, corresponding to the activity of brain waves.

Daniel Tucker, neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that the previous methods were based on a slow calculation to measure the time needed to integrate information on a network, a time that doubles " astronomically "by increasing the number of intersections of this network to take forever.

But Tucker recently proposed a very intelligent mathematical method that reduces this period to a few minutes and tests it on the measurements of two monkeys, which could be a first step towards better experiments on this theory.

Only then will it be possible to explain major dilemmas, such as the comparison of "consciousness" between different brains. Although Tonyoni's theory is not proven, Tucker thinks that it has inspired other scientists to think about computer awareness, which opens the way to other theories.

Once the theory of integrated information has been proven, it will have a huge impact and the application circuit will extend beyond the neurosciences and the medical field and help solve the problems. artificial intelligence.

According to Mr. Tononi, the system on which computers are based today – based on semiconductor networks – excludes the possibility of improving the integration of information to the point of the sensitization. Even though these computers can be programmed to behave like human beings, they will never reach self-awareness as we do.

"Some people think that computers will soon be able to reach people's perceptions, not just playing chess, recognizing faces, driving cars, but in any case, but if the theory of integrated information is correct, they can act as we do – with the man – but she will be deaf from within "because she will not enjoy an inner consciousness producing intelligent behavior.

Tononi says the problem goes beyond computational skills or programming, even though the "physical structure" seems to be similar.

This theory can help to understand how people treat each other. Thomas Maloney, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Collective Intelligence Center, recently applied the theory to human teams in a laboratory and in a natural environment. He found that the assessment of the integration of information among team members may have helped to predict the direction in which the entire group would pay off. in many tasks, which he thought would help to understand what sometimes makes big groups of people think, Make one.

But until now, we can not be certain of the knowledge of crab, the computer or even the entire community. But who knows, the future theory of Tononi allowed us to read ideas with "spirits" very different from our minds!

You can read the original article from BBC News

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