Lunch | Shimon Edelman | Consciousness: A Computational Account of Phenomenal Experience

I outline a computational theory of phenomenal conscious experience, that is, of the basic awareness and its obligatory attendant feelings, involving neither the awareness of awareness nor a sense of self. This Dynamical Emergence Theory (DET) identifies phenomenality with certain intrinsic properties of the dynamics of the system in question. More specifically, it aims to explain the structure, the quantity, and the quality of phenomenal experience in terms of trajectories through the space of the system's emergent metastable macrostates and their intrinsic (that is, observer-independent) topology and geometry. Joint work with Roy Moyal and Tomer Fekete.