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Will Artificial Intelligence soon surpass the capacities of the human mind and will Strong Artificial General Intelligence replace the contemporary Weak AI? It might appear to be so, but there are certain fundamental issues that have to be addressed before this can happen. There can be no intelligence without understanding, and there can be no understanding without getting meanings. Contemporary computers manipulate symbols without meanings, which are not incorporated in the computations. This leads to the Symbol Grounding Problem; how could meanings be incorporated? The use of self-explanatory sensory information has been proposed as a possible solution. However, self-explanatory information can only be used in neural network machines that are different from existing digital computers and traditional multilayer neural networks. In humans self-explanatory information has the form of qualitative sensory experiences, qualia. To have reportable qualia is to be phenomenally conscious. This leads to the hypothesis about an unavoidable connection between the solution of the Symbol Grounding Problem and consciousness. If, in general, self-explanatory information equals to qualia, then machines that utilize self-explanatory information would be conscious. The author presents the associative neural architecture HCA as a solution to these problems and the robot XCR-1 as its partial experimental verification.

I propose and defend the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface Theory of Consciousness. Mental processes form a hierarchy of mental representations with maximally egocentric (self-centered) representations at the bottom and maximally allocentric (other-centered) representations at the top. Phenomenally conscious states are states that are relatively intermediate in this hierarchy. More specifically, conscious states are hybrid states that involve the reciprocal interaction between relatively allocentric and relatively egocentric representations. Thus a conscious state is composed of a pair of representations interacting at the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface. What a person is conscious of is determined by what the contributing allocentric and egocentric representations are representations of. The phenomenal character of conscious states is identical to the representational content of the reciprocally interacting egocentric and allocentric representations.

Quantum computing (QC) is imminent; can it add to the seasoned fields of electronic and computer music? After all, it seems unwarranted to requisition time on a massively parallel peta FLOP (10¹⁵, quadrillion calculations per second) supercomputer like the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest, reaching 93.015 pFLOPS. There is however, something QCs will be able to do that will remain impossible on even a putative yottaFLOP (10²⁴) Turing machine if Cartesian interactive dualism is the correct solution to the problem of awareness/consciousness. A special, 2^nd generation class of conscious-QC modeled after the mind-body interface will be able to transduce physically real stored (extracellular) elements of mind (qualia): thought, mood, feelings, emotion directly into the awareness of the subject in a manner breaking down the so-called 1^st person - 3^rd person barrier. The theoretical model introduced, a paradigm shift in terms of current thinking in Cognitive Science (mind = brain) or cognitive musicology, is sufficiently mature to be experimentally testable suggesting that conscious-QC music may only be a couple of decades away.

Neurobiological naturalism, an extension of John Searle's concept of biological naturalism, says primary (sensory) consciousness is a scientifically tractable problem based on natural laws although brains that possess consciousness display certain advanced neurobiological system-features. These features are complex, fast, hierarchical, system-wide, internal, and often topographically organized neuron-neuron interactions. We lay out the neurophilosophical problem of the ontological irreducibility of the subjective to the objective, describe the general and special neurobiological features of the conscious neural hierarchies in vertebrates, and then bring in evolutionary considerations to show how consciousness could have evolved in the first vertebrates. Our combined neurobiological, neuroevolutionary and neurophilosophical approach offers a solution to the hard problem of how and why physical brains can cause experiences and why consciousness and subjectivity are neurontologically irreducible.

Electromagnetic quantum field interactions provide a deeper understanding of the emergence of consciousness through an ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quasiparticle interactions in brain matter can produce “virtual” particles, hitherto mathematical conveniences, which reflect the manifold images of brain activities in terms of effects on charged particles that have physical quantum effect similar to the Aharonov-Bohm effect in quantum field theory. Electromagnetic potentials in the quantum domain pervade the entire brain through causative interactions. The exchange of energy quanta during quantum field interactions emerge as distinct patterns of quasiparticles and their entanglement produces waves of “virtual” particles with periodicities of discrete energies tethered through a common quantum potential as they interact and collectively represent the emergence of self-awareness as a quantum dynamic effect carried on the magnetic vector potential throughout the brain. This is caused by the magnetic dipole moments sensitivity to the phase shifts entrained by the zeitgeber acting on dipolar molecules in interfacial water. The emergence of consciousness is inseparable (spatiotemporally) in the sense that the endogenous electromagnetic field (and therefore the forces acting on the particles) vanish yet neurophenomenologically separate from the physical through the magnetic dipole moments sensitivity to the phase shifts of the coherent system. The subjective aspect of consciousness or phenomenal consciousness facilitates qualia as quantum information through information-physical interactions that metastabilize into rhythms unfolding through resonance into access consciousness as cognizable associable representations of subjective experiences. The transition from subjectivity occurs non-reductively from the microlevel to the macrolevel as a mechanism of spontaneous breaking of symmetry resulting from “photon” behavior of interfacial water instantiated by macroergic effects in the nuclei of neurons through a continuous supply of metabolic energy. The emergence of consciousness in living organisms disappears once autopoietic processes in populations of neurons cease to function.

The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990's that consciousness depends on biologically “orchestrated” coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi-Penrose (DP) scheme of “objective reduction” (“OR”) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (“Orch OR”) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space-time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain's biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce novel suggestions of (1) beat frequencies of faster Orch OR microtubule dynamics (e.g. megahertz) as a possible source of the observed electroencephalographic ("EEG") correlates of consciousness and (2) that OR played a key role in life's evolution. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.