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The color phi phenomenon. Two dots of different color are shown in rapid succession. For certain spatial and temporal distances, the perception is that of the first dot moving to the position of the second dot while abruptly changing color somewhere along the path. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009344.g001
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We show how anomalous time reversal of stimuli and their associated responses can exist in very small connectionist models. These networks are built from dynamical toy model neurons which adhere to a minimal set of biologically plausible properties. The appearance of a “ghost” response, temporally and spatially located in between responses caused b...
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... Regarding issues of the order and timing of consciousness, investigations of chronostasis (eg, Melcher et al, 2020) and postdictive effects (for reviews, see Herzog et al, 2020;Michel and Doerig, 2021;and Sergent, 2018) would likely be informative. Such paradigms include the cutaneous rabbit illusion (Geldard and Sherrick, 1972), illusory and invisible audiovisual rabbits (Stiles et al, 2018), color fusion effects (Pilz et al, 2013), the color phi illusion (Keuninckx and Cleeremans, 2021), the sequential metacontrast paradigm (Otto et al, 2006), rapid serial visual presentation (Akyurek and Wolff, 2016), and cues that are presented after a faint Gabor grating (Sergent et al, 2013). Key in these paradigms would be the relationship between explicit memory and the conscious postdictive experience. ...
We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system-prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system-quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system.
