Your HI Mind
Humanity in Action.
The Nature of Being Human.
Introducing The HI Mind Theories of Consciousness.
The Hard Problem
Historically, adequate descriptions, models, and theories of consciousness have, despite valiant intellectual efforts, fallen short of actually describing much about consciousness itself.As an example. One of the best theories, in my humble opinion, is the Global Workspace Theory proposed by Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s.
The brain is recognised to be immensely complex and all work on consciousness suffers a challenge to describe our experience of consciousness.
The descriptions on this page are very brief but should give most people a basic idea of how I think our mind actually works.
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A background:
Tell Me More: The Hard Problem
The HI Mind Theories: A Potential Solution
HI Mind Theories:
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Consciousness in the HI Mind Model
Defining Consciousness
Instead of describing consciousness from our experiences, or from trying to describe what processes might be involved, I suggest a slightly different approach.
For example, consciousness described from a functional point of view could be defined initially as:
Consciousness is that part of our mind that manages our mind as a whole to solve problems and to maximise our living benefit.
By focusing on function we can use a more advanced model of the mind (the HI Mind Model) as a basis for understanding consciousness.
A Solution:
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An Overview
Here is a simplified schematic overview of what we can now describe, including some basic functional characteristics:
Dynamic Processing
But consciousness is dynamic; constantly changing. This next schematic indicates the communication processes that support the mind to work as an apparent single entity:
The thicker arrows indicate complex and potentially intense two-way communications including information-transfer and feedback loops.
The thinner arrows indicate sensory input from the subconscious, compulsions, emotional content, memory retrieval, urges to support habitual behaviours, and so on. The Subconscious also accepts information from the focuses that results in memory-making, building of habits, commands for body actions, and so on.
Altered States of Mind
Our Core Consciousness can, in effect, focus-into each of the individual focuses of mind.
With this basic model we can also begin to explore some of the changes in consciousness that we experience.
Altered States:
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Imperatives
Each Focus has its own specialist job to do. I am aware of certain themes that play out in my own motivations that I suggest are intrinsic, genetically-supported, and different to compulsions and emotions.
Imperatives:
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Some Applications
Research. This theory offers potential to interpret the results of research to be interpreted and related to cognitive and social sciences as well as psychology in general.
Psychology. This theory offers many advantages in terms of understanding motivation and offering improvements to therapy.
A.I. (1). There are significant opportunities for an approach like this to significantly advance the capabilities of future AI and to give possible constraints to keep AI safe to deploy whilst benefitting society.
A.I. (2). There may even be research opportunities to work towards conscious A.I. or to use A.I. to further explore human consciousness.