The Cognitive Mechanisms and Formal Models of Consciousness

Abstract

Consciousness is the sense of self and the sign of life in natural intelligence. One of the profound myths in cognitive informatics, psychology, brain science, and computational intelligence is how consciousness is generated by physiological organs and neural networks in the bran. This paper presents a formal model and a cognitive process of consciousness in order to explain how abstract consciousness is generated and what its cognitive mechanisms are. The hierarchical levels of consciousness are explored from the facets of neurology, physiology, and computational intelligence. A rigorous mathematical model of consciousness is created that elaborates the nature of consciousness. The cognitive process of consciousness is formally described using denotational mathematics. It is recognized that consciousness is a set of real-time mental information about bodily and emotional status of an individual stored in the cerebellums known as the Conscious Status Memory (CSM) and is processed/interpreted by the thalamus. The abstract intelligence model of consciousness can be applied in cognitive informatics, cognitive computing, and computational intelligence toward the mimicry and simulation of human perception and awareness of the internal states, external environment, and their interactions in reflexive, perceptive, cognitive, and instructive intelligence.

Towards the abstract system theory of system science for cognitive and intelligent systems

“…Cognitive informatics is a transdisciplinary enquiry of computer science, information science, cognitive science, and intelligence science, which investigates into the internal information processing mechanisms and processes of the brain and natural intelligence, as well as their engineering applications in cognitive computing [38,44,50,53,57,64,68,76,80,81,84,[87][88][89][90]. Brain informatics is a joint field of brain and information sciences that studies the information processing mechanisms of the brain at the physiological level by computing and medical imagination technologies [51,52,56,60,62,65,67,69,70,79]. Brain informatics explains how the most complicated physiological system, the human brain, is formed based on complex nervous systems and neurological foundations as observed in brain anatomy and neurophysiology [7,23,65].…”

Theoretical Models of Consciousness: A Scoping Review

“…The conscious functions include the layers of metacognition, inference, and cognitive functions sustained by layer 5–7. These functions are acquired, highly plastic, and intentionally controlled based on willingness, goals, and motivations [ 58 ]. In the model, the thalamus and cerebellum are considered key structures for consciousness.…”

Can Computers Become Conscious and Overcome Humans?

“…Some previous works have been also tried to generalize and characterize some features of consciousness and their connection with types of machines and/or artificial systems (Aleksander and Morton, 2008 ; Wang, 2012 ). For example in Arsiwalla et al ( 2017 ), even though that article still keeps a computational view of consciousness and social interactions, they conclude that consciousness is not only due to computational capacity and put emphasis in social interactions (which can also be related to emotions) as a trigger of consciousness.…”