Federal University of Maranhão, Maranhão, Brazil.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2010;657:303-13. doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-79100-5_17.
Consciousness has been a subject of crescent interest among the neuroscience community. However, building machine models of it is quite challenging, as it involves many characteristics and properties of the human brain which are poorly defined or are very abstract. Here I propose to use information theory (IT) to give a mathematical framework to understand consciousness. For this reason, I used the term "computational". This work is grounded on some recent results on the use of IT to understand how the cortex codes information, where redundancy reduction plays a fundamental role. Basically, I propose a system, here called "organism", whose strategy is to extract the maximal amount of information from the environment in order to survive. To highlight the proposed framework, I show a simple organism composed of a single neuron which adapts itself to the outside dynamics by taking into account its internal state, whose perception is understood here to be related to "feelings".
意识一直是神经科学界越来越感兴趣的话题。然而，构建它的机器模型非常具有挑战性，因为它涉及到人类大脑的许多特征和属性，这些特征和属性定义不明确或非常抽象。在这里，我提议使用信息论 (IT) 为理解意识提供一个数学框架。出于这个原因，我使用了“计算”这个术语。这项工作的基础是最近关于使用 IT 来理解大脑皮层如何编码信息的一些结果，其中冗余减少起着至关重要的作用。基本上，我提出了一个系统，称为“生物体”，其策略是从环境中提取最大信息量以维持生存。为了突出所提出的框架，我展示了一个由单个神经元组成的简单生物体，它通过考虑自身内部状态来适应外部动态，在这里，我们将生物体的感知理解为与“感觉”有关。
