Analysis of Shannon's entropy to contrast between the Embodied and Neurocentrist hypothesis of conscious experience.

Autor: Martínez García SJ; Posgrado en Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Unidad de Posgrado, Edificio D, 1° Piso, Circuito de Posgrados, Ciudad Universitaria, Coyoacán, C.P. 04510, CDMX, Mexico. Electronic address: sjmgg@comunidad.unam.mx., Padilla Longoria P; Universidad Nacional Autónoma and Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y Sistemas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Circuito Escolar sin número, Ciudad Universitaria, Delegación Coyoacán, C.P. 04510, D.F, Mexico. Electronic address: pablo@mym.iimas.unam.mx.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Bio Systems [Biosystems] 2024 Dec; Vol. 246, pp. 105323. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Sep 05.
DOI: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2024.105323
Abstrakt: We usually accept that consciousness is in the brain. This statement corresponds to a Neurocentrist view. However, with all the physical and physiological data currently available, a convincing explanation of how consciousness emerges has not been given this topic is aborded by Anil Seth (2021). Because of this, a natural question arises: Is consciousness really in the brain or not? If the answer is no, this corresponds to the Embodied perspective. We cannot discriminate between these two points of view because we cannot identify how the organism processes the information. If we try to measure information processing in the brain, then the Neurocentrist view is unavoidable. For example, the information integration theory of Tononi's research group and the global work area theory developed by Dehaene and Baars, focus solely on the brain without considering aspects of Embodied vision (See Tononi, 2021; Dehaene, 2021). In this article, we propose an index based on Shannon's entropy, capable of identifying the leading processing elements acting: Are they mainly inner or external? In order to validate it, we performed simulations with networks accounting for different amounts of internal and outer layers. Since Shannon's entropy is an abstract measure of the information content, this index is not dependent on the physical network nor the proportion of different layers. Therefore, we validate the index as free of bias. This index is a way to discriminate between Embodied from Neurocentrist hypotheses.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE