Research on natural and artificial brains is proceeding at a rapid pace. However, the understanding of the essence of consciousness has changed slightly over the millennia, and only the last decade has brought some progress to the area. Scientific ideas emerged that the soul could be a product of the material body and that calculating machines could imitate brain processes. However, the authors of this book reject the previously common dualism—the view that the material and spiritual-psychic processes are separate and require a completely different substance as their foundation.

Reductive Model of the Conscious Mind is a forward-thinking book wherein the authors identify processes that are the essence of conscious thinking and place them in the imagined, simplified structure of cells able to memorize and transmit information in the form of impulses, which they call neurons. The purpose of the study is to explain the essence of consciousness to the degree of development of natural sciences, because only the latter can find a way to embed the concept of the conscious mind in material brains. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 works to convince readers that the emergence of consciousness does not require detailed knowledge of the structure and morphology of the brain, with the exception of some specific properties of the neural network structure that the authors attempt to point out. Part 2 proves that the biological structure of many natural brains fulfills the necessary conditions for consciousness and intelligent thinking. Similarly, Part 3 shows the ways in which artificial creatures imitating natural brains can meet these conditions, which gives great hopes for building artificially intelligent beings endowed with consciousness. Covering topics that include cognitive architecture, the embodied mind, and machine learning, this book is ideal for cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, psychologists, researchers, academicians, and advanced-level students. The book can also help to focus the research of linguists, neurologists, and biophysicists on the biophysical basis of postulated information processing into knowledge structures.

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Reviews & Statements

The Motivated Emotional Mind model, characterized by a completely biophysical and reductionist nature, may have a decisive impact on the foundational ideas of civilization. It challenges widespread beliefs held by the majority of people that our psyche, free will, and emotions have a transcendental basis, suggesting a kind of dualism that combines the material world with a spiritual element. While science has made significant progress in demonstrating the causal closure of the physical world, the realm of phenomenal feelings has remained a mystery, often described as an explanatory gap, perhaps impossible to bridge by human minds. The presented model, along with subsequent works, offers a compelling explanation for this apparent dualism. It explains how organism reactions largely remain automatic and spontaneous, without the involvement of consciousness. Nonetheless, both humans and animals exhibit a significant range of freedom in decision-making. This specific volitional freedom enables them to bear moral responsibility for their actions. The reductionist model of the conscious mind provides hope that artificial minds can attain consciousness and, in turn, become also moral entities.

– Wieslaw Galus, Independent Researcher

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Editor/Author Biographies

Wiesław L. Galus, received the M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in solid-state physics from the Military University of Technology in Warsaw. He worked in laser radiation detection and modulation at the Institute of Quantum Electronics of the Military University of Technology and the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Micro-fusion in Warsaw. His work focused on the theory of detection of ultrashort radiation pulses and noise theory. Co-founder of the high-tech Vigo Photonics SA company producing medium- and far-infrared detectors. He is currently involved in the philosophy of mind and modeling natural and artificial brain operation as an independent researcher. Together with the co-author of the book, Janusz Starzyk, attention has been drawn to the fundamental role of motivation in conscious reactions. Motivations for action arise from emotional states triggered by unsatisfied needs of the organism. The associative abilities of neuronal hierarchical representations of these states enable learning and the formation of intentional behaviors. These interdependencies form the basis of the Motivated Emotional Mind model (MEM). In subsequent works, Wieslaw Galus expanded the MEM model by proposing the hypothesis of the identity of mental phenomenal states with the biophysical states of lower sensory fields in the neural network structure that constitutes the brain. This is a crucial contribution to the theory of identity in the mind-brain relationship. He utilized the MEM model to elucidate first-person, subjective sensory experiences (qualia), as well as phenomenal feelings during imaginings, recollections, and dreams. He also explained the role of neuronal processes propagating from lower sensory layers to upper cognitive layers (bottom-up) and the feedback, backward process (top-down) in shaping the hierarchy of knowledge in the mind and the processes of planning and decision-making.

Janusz A. Starzyk received a M.S. degree in applied mathematics, a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, and the Habilitation degree in electrical engineering from the Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland. He was an Assistant Professor with the Institute of Electronics Fundamentals, Warsaw University of Technology. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow and a research engineer at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. Since 1991, he has been a Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Ohio University, Athens, and the Director of Embodied Intelligence Laboratories. Since 2007, he has been the Head of the Information Systems Applications, University of Information Technology and Management, Rzeszow, Poland. His research interests include embodied machine intelligence, motivated goal-driven learning, self-organizing associative spatiotemporal memories, active learning of sensory-motor interactions, machine consciousness, and autonomous robots and avatars.

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