Towards engineering an artificial consciousness with Karl Friston and Mark Solms

Professors
Karl Friston and Mark Solms

Saturday, 23 November
11 a.m. (EST- Eastern USA)

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This webinar will be approximately two hours long.

Mark Solms will briefly review his reasons for equating consciousness with brainstem affective arousal and therefore with ‘post-synaptic gain’. He will then briefly outline his basis for equating the latter with the statistical concept of ‘precision modulation’ (i.e. inverse ‘uncertainty’). Against this background, he will describe his current and ongoing attempts to engineer an artificial consciousness. This presentation will be followed by a response from Karl Friston, which will in turn be followed by a conversation between the two speakers, and between them and the audience.

Bios
Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging. He invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). These contributions were motivated by schizophrenia research and theoretical studies of value-learning, formulated as the dysconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia. Mathematical contributions include variational Laplacian procedures and generalized filtering for hierarchical Bayesian model inversion. Friston currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions. His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference). Friston received the first Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping (1996) and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999). In 2000 he was President of the international Organization of Human Brain Mapping. In 2003 he was awarded the Minerva Golden Brain Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006. In 2008 he received a Medal, College de France and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2011. He became of Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2012, received the Weldon Memorial prize and Medal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology and was elected as a member of EMBO (excellence in the life sciences) in 2014 and the Academia Europaea in (2015). He was the 2016 recipient of the Charles Branch Award for unparalleled breakthroughs in Brain Research and the Glass Brain Award, a lifetime achievement award in the field of human brain mapping. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of York, Zurich and Radboud University.

Mark Solms, Ph.D., is the Co-Chair (with Cristina Alberini) of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. He is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and the South African and American Psychoanalytic Associations. He is also Science Director of APsaA. He coined the word ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ in 1998, and has been a major contributor to the development of this field. He is a Full Professor and the Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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