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Consciousness and Subjective Experience journal club

This is a collaborative biweekly engagement involving primarily members of the Carboncopies Foundation and of the Brain Preservation Foundation. We are primarily discussing papers and books that cumulatively give us a good understanding of the state of the field, and that ultimately enable us to connect experimental and reductionist approaches to theories of consciousness and its neural correlates with approaches that begin with the structure of subjective phenomenology. We include specific attention to all aspects of what Chalmers has dubbed the "hard problem" of consciousness.

Ultimately, we aim for insights gained to coalesce into what we may consider a satisfying and defensible model of consciousness and subjective experience that aligns with and informs foundational core assumptions with regards to whole brain emulation.

Furthermore, insights into the requirements for subjective experience, being able to distinguish types of intelligent processing that have conscious subjective experiences from those that probably cannot, implications for the needs of well-being versus the risks of suffering, and attribution of personhood will inform work in our WBE Ethics Framework project.

The journal club meets biweekly. If you are interested in joining, please message us at contact@carboncopies.org.

Materials studied so far:

  • Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, Thomas Metzinger, MIT Press, 2004
  • Falsification and consciousness, Johannes Kleiner and Erik Hoel, Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021
  • Facing Up to the Problem of Consciosuness, David J. Chalmers, In The Character of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Consciousness and the Fallacy of Misplaced Objectivity, Francesco Ellia, Jeremiah Hendren, Matteo Grasso, Csaba Kozma, Garrett Mindt, Jonathan P. Lang, Andrew M. Haun, Larissa Albantakis, Melanie Boly, Giulio Tononi, Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021
  • What Subjectivity Is Not, Joseph Neisser, In The Science of Subjectivity, 2015